So this is where I'm kind of stuck, I'd like to get sky without banding, as well as efficient compression that preserves highlight details, but I can't seem to get both at the same time. I tried messing with all the settings FastFlix offered to see if I can recreate the quality of HandBrake, and while enabling checkbox 'HDR10 Optimizations' helped a bit, I was shocked that even at CRF 1, nearly lossless absurd quality level, it still didn't look quite as sharp as HandBrake, at a much much larger file size. Here is the frame with highlight detail area highlighted in red (tonemapped down from HDR to SDR in two different ways) so you can see what type of highlights I'm talking about: Using FastFlix really did solve the banding issue, but the quality of the details went back to levels comparable with NVENC straight from Davinci Resolve, and while it looked a bit better than NVENC, it was far from the quality increase I saw when using HandBrake.Īnd it's specifically the highlights that have issues. I looked for solution and found FastFlix, GUI for ffmpeg that focuses on HDR compression. Upon further research I found people saying that HandBrake HDR support is tacked on and imperfect due to program being fundamentally designed to handle 8 bit video or something like that. Thought I found the holy grail of compression for HDR videos, but then I noticed banding present in the sky. mov file when exported directly from Resolve and then compressing that down to 10.4 GB using slow preset with quality set to Q13.

I went about testing this by exporting my 12 min clip using DNxHR codec which compressed down to 139 GB. I noticed that compressing HDR videos with HandBrake was giving me noticeably better results than compressing them with NVENC straight from Davinci Resolve, mainly the videos looked much sharper, like more detail is preserved at the same file size, so much more that I had to go nearly 10x filesize to achieve the same quality using NVENC straight from Resolve.

Compressing video with handbrake