Ideas for realtime-or-faster 4K H.264 exports with Resolve? (6700K, 970M, 2x 1TB MX300 SSDs, 40GB RAM, etc)

PianoPlayer88Key · March 21, 2018

Hi all,

I'm doing some edits on 4K (UHD) videos recorded with my Panasonic FZ1000, and when I go to export / deliver in Resolve 12.5 (the free version), it's so dang slow! (Yes I know 14 is out now, but after a little google searching, it's apparently not recommended to update while you have existing projects in progress, if I understand right.)

The video I'm trying to export right now is about 49 minutes long, but Resolve says it'll take about 3-4.5 hours to encode, at around 6-9 fps or so. I'd *REALLY* like to be able to export in real time (30 fps for 4K in my case) or faster, to the final video file. I have quite a few hour-long-plus videos I need to edit, export, etc, and in the future there will likely be quite a few more.

My settings in Resolve are Quicktime H.264, 3840x2160 Ultra HD, 29.97 fps, quality 38400 kbps (I plan to upload to YouTube - they recommend 35-45 Mbps; I have about 10 mbps upload so there's a bottleneck there too), keyframes every 15 frames, the rest is pretty much default. (Ideally, for YouTube export, I'd like to be able to export in such a way so that when I upload to YouTube, the video will be available right away, without YT having to "process" / transcode the video.)

As for hardware, I'm working on my Clevo laptop with an i7-6700K, GTX 970M with 6GB VRAM, 40GB DDR4-2133 RAM (1x8GB and 2x16GB). Resolve is installed on a 250GB Crucial MX200 SSD, my source files are on a 1TB MX300, and I'm exporting to another 1TB MX300.

Anyone have ideas for making the process go several times faster? I saw something via google search that said something about exporting to uncompressed, then using handbrake or ffmpeg or something to transcode to H.264. I started to try that, though, but stopped when I saw the export to Quicktime Uncompressed RGB 8-bit was only going at about 4-5 fps. I've also been googling some about NVENC, QuickSync, etc. (For now it looks like my CPU's getting all the load.) Last I checked, QuickSync isn't supported on my laptop, due to the iGPU never being used. (My laptop has G-SYNC, and I think it's hardwired to only use the NVidia GPU because of that, if I understand right.)

Buying new hardware (or paid software) is out of the question at this time.

Maybe there's a way to bring AviDemux back into my workflow? (I had been using it, but Resolve has some functions I'm starting to use now that AviDemux doesn't have.) Or what about Handbrake or something else?

One thing I find interesting on my SSDs is the write speeds seem to be quite a bit lower than I'd expect. Could that have anything to do with it? Although, I'd think encoding to about 40 Mbps would only need about 5 MB/s write speeds...

The 256GB Crucial M550 SSD in my desktop (i7-4790K, GTX 1060 3GB, 32GB (4x8G) DDR3-1600, aforementioned SSD as boot drive + a bunch of HDDs for storage) seems to be quite a bit better on some benchmarks. Compare the 4K write speeds, for example!