DaVinci Resolve as of 2025 1st May, has some issues exporting in compressed formats. In my case, exporting an mp4 in codec H.264 at 20kbps produced significantly lower quality than the source material, blurring out certain parts of shots and omitting fine details across the board, even in perfectly lit outside environments during day time.
The auto-best bitrate preset in DaVinci Resolve manages to keep all details in the video, but produces a ludicrous file size, comparable to lossless MXF footage. All other quality-oriented presets suffer from this too to some extent.
Setting a limit bitrate created abysmal results, even at crazy high bitrates like 80kbps.
In short, byte for byte at the same quality, DaVinci Resolve is horrible at rendering compressed videos.
This was seen in footage captured virtually but it affects all video.
The fix was to export in an uncompressed format like DNxHD or DNxHR, then compress using Handbrake.
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after finishing editing, export from DaVinci Resolve in a lossless format
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set the format MXF OP1A
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set the codec DNxHD
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set the codec type 1080p 220/185/175 10-bit
This is specific for 1080p 30fps.
There are tables online that describe which codec and type of codec works for each resolution, fps and bitrate combinations. DNxHR is used for the highest qualities while DNxHD is for the more mainstream qualities.
The output file will be huge, even bigger than the source even if you cut down the source heavily. It's normal.
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compress the result using Handbrake
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set the format to MP4
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set the codec to h.264
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set the fps to constant 30
You may run into compatibility issues if you use variable fps.
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set the quality to 15
The slider is a bit confusing here. The higher (towards 0) you set it the more quality you get with a higher file size. Quality at 51 produces the worst video render, while quality at 0 produces the best.
In my experience, anything higher than 15 (towards 0) is not noticeable at 1080p 30fps. YMMV. This setting is tied with the encoder speed.
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set the encoding speed to medium
This speed determines how efficient the render is. The faster it tries to go, the more size it will waste for higher quality bitrates. Please test yourself and if your PC gets the same size and quality renders at the faster presets, use a faster preset. That is very likely to be the case.
Make adjustments to the Handbrake export depending on what quality, size and export speed you want. Every PC is different here and this may be why Resolve sucks so much at compressed exports.
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This is an amazing piece of software and I recommend it to other users at a beginner level like me. This is in no way to be taken as a "do not use DaVinci Resolve". I recommend using it over any other software I've tried, especially over Sony Vegas.
To give some numbers, with this method I was able to achieve pretty much the same quality as my source material, at the size of a 20k bitrate MP4 export from Resolve. The downside is the speed. It takes significantly more time to run the 2 renders compared to just exporting from Resolve, even in the auto-best preset.