Support AV1 Video Encoding and Decoding

Edit:RJL beat me, has a couple solid comments. So mine is now "in addition".

Well, jeepers ... I work for/with/teach pro colorists, have been "in" that crowd over a decade, use Resolve daily, and teach it. So I think I can add some perspective to your comments.

Resolve began as a $250,000 per-seat grading app, right? And it was really about the best digital grading option in the early days, but Holy Antman, expensive. But the company still didn't make a good profit. Then after BlackMagic bought the failing company, they dropped the price, first to like $9500, then a year later or so to $300.

Why? Resolve is a total loss leader "product" for BM. Their company profit is based on selling hardware ... and I highly doubt they make nearly enough from selling licenses of Resolve, to pay the server space for downloading it.

For example, I've enough BM kit I've bought that I'm both running the Studio version, and have extra licenses sitting in a drawer. Good kit ... love my BM cameras, on my second Atem mini pro switcher ... those are pretty 'cheap', but last only 3 years or so before dying. Decklink & other stuff.

As far as Resolve being "heavy" in Hollywood, it's probably used as a grading app only by more houses than any other app. Next would be Baselight probably, then Scratch. So it's the standard app especially in the US for major TV and many long-form grading jobs. In Europe, Baselight is a lot more used than here, especially for nearly all long-form work.

For editing? No, Resolve is not heavily used as an editing app ... yet. Personally, I can edit in Resolve, at need to test something ... but it's a lot clunkier than Pr or Avid for that matter for many parts of editing still. Better than when I started working with it back around 15, but still ... not "here" yet, really.

Among other things, the available keyboard shorts for edit work are far less than Pr or Avid have.

And as far as codec support, that varies by app. Premiere has ProRes Raw, which ... do not EVER expect ProRes RAW to be supported in Resolve. Their staffers are very testy about even being asked about it.

Resolve has better support for a couple other codecs/log-forms, as of Premiere 24.x. But Premiere 25.x, shipping in a week from now, adds a ton of things including a lot of Sony, Canon, and Fuji log forms.

All pro video post apps have holes in them. Ain't none of them perfect.

So as a practical guy, use what gets your work out the door to your clients best for you. And don't waste emotional time on huge companies ... any huge company.

Just get work done. That's what tools are for. I don't care which brand of hammer I use, I only care how the blame thing works.

For me, Resolve introduced a completely different set of issues. For one, its free version neither has a software H.264 or HEVC encoder at all nor can one be added in (unless one pays for the Studio version), and since it does not have a GPU hardware encoder at all the Windows version must rely solely on whatever encoder Windows itself natively has access to (which may be none at all and therefore cannot export to H.264 or HEVC on its own on such a system), depending on the system's software configuration.

Secondly, Resolve (at least in its free version) does not support several older but still commonly used video and audio codecs at all, and therefore such media must be converted to another format using external third-party software before it can be imported into Resolve.

SOLUTION was SO easy!
Found out, that DaVinci Resolve supports AV1 since version 18 back in mid 2023!
Installed it for FREE and it works like charm - just dragged an 1.5 GB AV1 MKV into Resolve, got my clip preview, hit space and it played back flawlessly. So, Adobe, I'll do this project with the FREE version of DaVinci Resolve.

@MyerPjYou may look on their website: They're at least as big in PRO movie blockbusters as Adobe which finally destroys your thin PRO argument 😉

Fact just seems to be that Adobe is once more behind which still makes me very sad as I 'grew up' with Adobe.
But back in the days the performance of Adobe products also was much better - they didn't manage to use the ressources of a modern PC system till now. Exported that Handbrake-transcoded AE-cropped video on Friday. While handbrake used ALL 16 cores max for transcoding (with still letting the Windows system stay absolutely smooth and responsive whilst having 99% CPU utilization), The Media Encoder export of the cropped file took very long with 10 to 12,5% GPU utilization (Mercury Playback Engine on RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB) and nearly no CPU utilization (around 23-28% for the whole Win system).

But that's another topic which this forum is full of for years now (best one: InDesign with 1 CPU and no GPU support on PC systems). Neverending and so sad. But please don't reply on that because as I said there are enough threads here about all those performance issues and that's off-topic here as this one is regarding AV1 support (maybe incl. MKV which DaVinci Resolve both does since 2023-06 as I now know).

@MyerPj  "The rewraped clip doesn't work in media player and in PP. You can extract the audio only. So, transcoding would be the only option currently."

^^That's exactly what I wrote...
And that's DAYS of transcoding for this particular project.

Regarding the plugin: it's an original Microsoft plugin which gets installed as soon as you need it. They have a modular approach - but support AV1 with this.

And your PRO tool statement is very thin as Adobe also actively advertises CC for social media content. That's commonly more smartphone than ARRI and screencasts are very social (video content rules on all major platforms and that will also be a big topic on Linkedin in 2025). So: very thin argument. Especially because it's not PP but CC which means PP, AE, ME(!!), Adobe Express (for Social Media) and so on 😉

Thanks for sending that. Yes, it behaves like the webm's I do have. 

It's still a delievery format and PP is primarily a pro edit tool, and focuses on Pro formats like ProRes and DNx, Cineform.

FWIW: Media Player in Windows 11 23H2, does not play your file. You must have downloaded some codec pack and you don't remember

that. I never download those.

The rewraped clip doesn't work in media player and in PP. You can extract the audio only. So, transcoding would be the only option currently.

Maybe they will add it one day? This thead has 80 upvotes, which is what will prompt management to consider a feature. Users that want this feature should upvote the thread, that's the big number to the left of the thread title looking from a desktop browser.

@MyerPjschrieb
Can you send a file or two to google drive or somewhere similar, so I could try it. I've got webm's but no av1s.

You tell me workarounds regarding AV1 and haven't any by yourself? Ok. 😉
Because of terms of data privacy I just recorded you a small new test clip - please download soon as WeTransfer doesn't store for long:
https://we.tl/t-7j8kZbFGYV

It's only 24s long but that should be good for testing.
As you said by yourself, you can easily wrap the clip to MP4 in no time.
But that was it then.

I'd just need some cropping and scaling, cutting stat and end points, adding a bunch of clips in a row and export. The absolutely most basic stuff which demands nothing from human and hardware.

The clip runs perfectly smooth with Windows 10 video player (no need for vlc or alike). NVIDIA supprts AV1 in hardware since the RTX 30 series: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gfecnt/202009/rtx-30-series-av1-decoding/ which is 4 years (!!) back now (GeForce RTX 3090 official launch: 24. Sep. 2020).

Can you send a file or two to google drive or somewhere similar, so I could try it. I've got webm's but no av1s.

Hey @Christian.Z 

We haven't used UserVoice for quite a while. The procedure now is to post to this forum, using an Idea, Bug or Discussion 'Conversation Type'. This post has "Idea" as its type, and I believe that is correct since it advocates for a new feature. Then users upvote the thread to show their interest, as of today, it has 80 upvotes. Not bad...

Please submit a Bug report / Feature request at the Adobe User Voice: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/

"Lousy to edit" is based on the structure of the files themselves. As seen by each of us from our own view of what we need to get done.

I work for/with/teach pro colorists, who are a heck of a lot more knowledgeable in general on formats/codecs/quality-across-generations stuff than most editors.

If original media is a raw form, or ProRes, or a high-Q camera's long-GOP like some of the big Sonys, that's ok. They'll work original media. Although I know, proxies or "optimised media" in Resolve do get often invoked for that latter.

But for most of the colorists I am around, still ... any significant drone/mirrorless long-GOP media incoming on a job ... gets immediately t-coded to ProRes for grading. Period. Even if supposedly 10-bit/422. Because it's a mess to handle grading. On "heavy iron".

It isn't going to lose squat in data during the t-code, and will perform during the grade vastly better.

The deliverable is yes, often in a highly compressed format.

So ... it depends on your perception of your needs and what is "good enough". And will vary for everyone.