David Harry
This video is showing how well DaVinci Resolve is playing back the VP9 video codec from within an MKV file. MKV is the Matroska codec wrapper/container and also the .mkv file extension.
The computer used was the Apple MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM and 512GB storage. Being the 512GB storage version, this also means that it has the 8 GPU cores on its Apple Silicon M1 processor/SoC. As the MacBook Air has the worse thermal throttling characteristics of all the Mac M1 computers to date. This means that what I’m doing in this video will be at least as good, possibly better, on the Mac Mini M1, MacBook Pro M1 and the iMac M1.
The video footage was sourced from the Sony PS5. This is gameplay capture video that the PS5 records internally. The gameplay and recording on the PS5 was 4K 60FPS and in HDR. This forces the PS5 to use the WEBM container/wrapper to hold the VP9 HDR 4K 60FPS video codec/stream and also a stereo audio track that is in the Opus audio codec format.
Because Resolve can’t import WEBM files and also can’t import and decode the Opus audio codec format, a re-mux is necessary. The re-mux was done using FFmpeg with a GUI frontend. During the re-muxing the VP9 video stream is transferred straight to the MKV file from the WEBM file. The Opus audio stream is transcoded to PCM so that Resolve is able to see/decode the audio. While the audio is a transcode, it is audibly indistinguishable compared to the source. The most important thing here is that the we are dealing with the native VP9 4K 60FPS HDR video stream that the PS5 encoded. Out of interest, the WEBM file was about 4.5GB in size and took about 15 seconds to re-mux to MKV, this includes the audio transcode.
Although I didn’t do an edit and export in this video, I have edited this footage in Resolve, exported a 4K 60FPS HDR H.265 MP4 and used it to upload to YouTube. The final upload on YouTube plays back in HDR and also has SDR conversions as well.
Interestingly, I also have an Atomos Ninja V and have captured the PS5’s HDMI output to it to record 4K 60FPS HDR to ProRes 422 HQ. This footage has then been edited in Resolve and uploaded as a HDR master to YouTube in H.265. Having looked at both workflows, it does appear that the MKV version of the workflow doesn’t look visually any different to the Ninja workflow. This may sound counterintuitive, it did to me, but my tests show that there really isn’t any need to record the PS5 to a HDMI recorder like the Ninja. This may well be due to the fact that both workflows use heavily compressed uploads for YouTube. And although the Ninja workflow includes 4:2:2 chroma-subsampling, again, it didn’t seem to have any advantages over the MKV workflow. However, if you were to upload a ProRes 422 HQ master from Resolve from the Ninja workflow, I’m sure this would give technical benefits. However, such a file would run into the hundreds of megabytes, depending on content runtime, and would be highly impractical for most people.
You can of course do editing from within the PS5, although its editing software, as good as it is for what it is, is nowhere as flexible as editing in Resolve or any other pro NLE.
I will be doing a full workflow video about the whole process to go from the PS5, to Resolve and then to YouTube soon. So keep an eye on my channel and Resolve playlist.
While I am new to Resolve and still learning to use it as my main NLE, migrating from Edius X by Grass Valley. My codec, resolution and frame rate tests may be useful to others. Once I’m happy that I’m at a sufficient level with Resolve’s NLE functions, I will start doing editing workflow videos.
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I’m David Harry, thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now.
Cheers,
Dave.