Quality of stills lowers significantly after exporting.

Hello.

I have some issue with exporting stills from my project.

This is what I see in Resolve, when I zoom in 100%:



This is what I get from an exported still:




I generated Optimized Media (Quarter Resolution, DNxHR SQ) for all my clips in the project and I suspect this may be the culprit.
I did uncheck 'use optimized media if available' in Playback dropdown menu just to make sure Resolve doesn't use these low quality clips.
In Image Scaling (Project Settings) Output Scaling is set to 'Match timeline settings'.

Is there any other setting that can affect stills quality?

I tried exporting the files as TIFFs (instead of PNGs) - didn't help.

I'm lost.

Thanks for any help.

The setting in the Playback menu won't affect export.

There is another option to use Optimized Media in the Video tab of the Deliver page. Make sure that's off.

Hello, Jim.
Thanks for stopping by.

I found the option you had mentioned and, unfortunately, it's unchecked, meaning Resolve won't use optimized media for delivery.

There must be some other way..

OK. What's your Input Scaling set to?

It was set to 'Scale entire image to fit'.
And just underneath, in Output Scaling, I had 'Scale entire image to fit', too.

I tried changing both to 'Center crop with no resizing' and saving - nothing changed.

Hmm.

I've got no other ideas. Sorry.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Can we start with some detail.
what is the source clip res, the timeline res, the render res?

That's okay, Jim.
Thanks for everything you did, appreciate it.

Hello, Peter!
Source clips resolution: 3840 x 2160
Timeline resolution: 1920 x 1080 since it's easier on my PC, BUT I do switch it to 3840 x 2160 before exporting stills / rendering.
Render resolution: 3840 x 2160

[Peter Chamberlain]

How are u exporting stills?

Right click on monitor - grab still, go to gallery tab, right click - export. Usually as PNGs.
I have always done it this way and never before have had any issues.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Right click on monitor - grab still, go to gallery tab, right click - export. Usually as PNGs.
I have always done it this way and never before have had any issues.

is this with the timeline set to the source res?
is the input scaling set to 'center crop no resize'

if not please test and let me know

Timeline resolution was set to 3840x2160 to match the source files.
Input scaling was set to 'Center crop no resize', as Jim mentioned above.

I tried updating to the newest Beta 4 and the only thing I got was:


After quickly reverting to Beta 3 all my media files became online again.
Stills quality, sadly, didn't improve.

That's okay, Jim.
Thanks for everything you did, appreciate it.

Hello, Peter!
Source clips resolution: 3840 x 2160
Timeline resolution: 1920 x 1080 since it's easier on my PC, BUT I do switch it to 3840 x 2160 before exporting stills / rendering.
Render resolution: 3840 x 2160

FYI Stills are grabbed to the gallery at the current Output Scaling settings.
Even with correct timeline setting, output scaling will affect grabbed stills resolution.
In my case I must change to UHD timeline AND UHD output scaling to be able to grab UHD stills for export.

FYI Stills are grabbed to the gallery at the current Output Scaling settings.
Even with correct timeline setting, output scaling will affect grabbed stills resolution.
In my case I must change to UHD timeline AND UHD output scaling to be able to grab UHD stills for export.

This is it!
I grabbed the stills when I was operating in HD timeline res and only changed it to UHD before exporting.

I grabbed them again, while working in UHD res, exported them the same way and they look perfect.

Many thanks!