Kyno Support

Please improve the H264 encoding/transcoding quality as it is not possible to deliver anything because of low quality. Even on the highest quality or over 120000 bits the footage has a lot of banding in the sky, very visible compression artifacts and a pulsing shake all over the image. Really terrible. With Handbrake or Adobe the H264 output is perfect. I am converting from DNxHR HQ. 

windows 10 64 bits. Original files Mavic 2 Pro Log 10 bits files rendered as  DNxHR HQ. Those HQ when transcoded to H264 Best Quality or 120000 bps give a very bad quality. If chosen best quality much worse than 120k Those final files are totally pixelated and unusable. The 120k are of much lower quality that what I achieve with Handbrake or Adobe. The compression artifacts are many and there is a weird image pulsing-flicker

If I transcode to Prores 422 it is fine so I guess the H264 transcoding with the PC latest version is not working right. I had to delete 17 files sent to 4 stock agencies because I didn't check 100% when I converted and when I did and saw the results I had to delete it from all the agencies and send again transcoded H264 with Handbrake. the settings were H264 Encoder Preset 2 lines before Slower Encoder Profile High Encoder Tune None Average bitrate 120000 2 pass encoding enabled.

The time of Kyno is ultra fast like 20 s on my computer for a 40s file The Handbrake is like 10 minutes with the 2 pass and the slower enabled for quality. If I go all the way to faster and 1 pass I get the same fast speed as Kyno.  So it seems that the only option that works on Kyno is a fast transcoding for proxies but not delivery .

Thank you Thomas. Knowing that, I will keep Handbrake at hand until you might improve this option in the future. Yeah many other parts are very useful. Transcoding to ProRes seems to work great although I have not compared it with the Adobe Media Encoder but as Davinci has no ProRes rendering for PC users Kyno is a great option to have. Fast browsing is also great. Much better that the database approach like Lightroom which I have never liked. Time is money and slow database browser/cataloguers are time expensive so I am glad that Kyno does not follows this route. 

I think that Handbrake is based on open source FFmpeg so it should not be difficult to achieve the same quality for Kyno in the transcoding terrain in the future. Kind regards

Cristian,

Just out of curiosity, why can't you upload as DNxHD or DNxHR?  I have to admit I'm not a codec expert, but my understanding is that it is equivalent to ProRes in size/quality.  And it has the advantage of being exportable/usable on both Mac and PC.

Though the files are a bit larger (~20-25%), you could also export to Cineform.

If there is a good reason that the DNx codecs won't work as well, I'd love to know about it so I can file it away for future use (I'm on a PC myself).

Scott

Hi Scott:

Most stock sites that I distribute my footage don't accept DNx codecs, all take H264 or Prores. I prefer H264 as the final size is much lower and storage space with backup adds quickly. When I have something that I want quality I export in Davinci in Uncompressed form 10 bits and convert with Adobe Media encoder to Prores 422 as it has many option to encode the video and audio. Kyno also has a good Prores conversion.

Ah, ok, that makes sense then. 

Though I don't really understand why they wouldn't want DNx?? rather than ProRes because, at least in my testing, DNx?? appears to be more efficient and equally editable.  Then again, that is only my testing using a third party transcoder, so that may have been a variable that affected my testing.

Thanks for the quick response!

Scott

My source clips are h265 MP4s, which don't play in Resolve on my laptop (Media Offline). But they do play in Kyno. So my goal is to ID subclips in Kyno in the h265 and export to Resolve.

So what CODEC/format should I use today on Windows 10 in DaVINCI Resolve 16? 

Kyno works well to mark in/out points and export as Prores 422. Resolve has no trouble with those. The only thing I'm still working on is how to have the metadata tags show up in Resolve. Having a database of tags, in/out points as favorites, a list of all my videos, is worth the price of Kyno. I need the database lifetime to be permanent.

I don't know why the H265 video shows up as Media Offline in Resolve on my laptop. Adobe Bridge also won't show thumbnails for any of my H265, but double-clicking on the blank icon launches on Potplayer and the video plays fine. And they play in Photos, Windows Media Player, etc. This is a very new Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel laptop. My XPS 9500 laptop can play H265 video in Resolve so I think it's something with the Acer or maybe its NVIDIA 2070 video card, or some driver, or .... I have found others with the same issue, and the only workaround I've seen mentioned is to disable hardware acceleration, though I haven't found that option in Resolve.

Thank you VERY, VERY much for the info on CODECs.

Sorry for any confusion...my Kyno tags are exporting to Resolve correctly :)