Sunday, August 03, 2025

Rendering in DaVinci to 23.976

So, the word on the street is that both DaVinci and Premiere do terrible h264 renders and you should first render out in high quality before using Handbrake or some such to make the video you'll put on YouTube or whatever. 

DaVinci timeline. Red arrow points to pre-rendered .mov file. 


That's... fine. I mean. It's fine. I still use DaVinci for many short uploads -- tests, some corporate stuff, etc. -- but I'll export final feature-length things in high-res before Handbraking them to HD.

I usually like to pre-render my acts (or 10-ish-long minute sections) and then put the pre-render at the highest track of the timeline. It makes rendering easier and it acts as a safety where the movie can be rebuilt in the future even if the software that edited it doesn't exist anymore. 

But here's a weird thing I've discovered in DaVinci. I shot this puppet opera at 23.976, mostly on a Blackmagic Pocket 4K, but some on a Panasonic GH4. For some reason, my timelines I made in DaVinci Resolve are set to exactly 24 frames per second. But seemingly, it does something odd with the 23.976 material inside the timeline. 

If I pre-render the timeline, the pre-rendered Quicktime (or whatever) slowly moves out of sync. But that seems to be because the automatic frame rate of the render is at the timeline's settings (24 fps). If I manually change that output to 23.976 it can then be re-imported and placed on the timeline and syncs just fine. 


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