Ingest MP4 into DaVinci Resolve on Mac/Windows

DaVinci Resolve is a wonderful video editing tool especially with the most advanced color corrector. It is widely used on many of the most popular feature films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and documentaries you watch every day. You may just start to use Resolve and try to ingest some media files like in MP4. However, DR might not work with some MP4 files sometimes due to the codec issue or other reasons. In this article, we will quickly solve the MP4 and DaVinci Resolve 12/11/10/9 incompatible issues.

MP4 and DaVinci Resolve

As a quite hot file extension, MP4 is widely used for saving media data and can be found in lots of places online or off line. But the problem with MP4 is, when you plan to edit the MP4 file with Resolve, you may find that this editing program fails to recognize or sometimes may crash, which is really a great pain. So what's the matter? Well, this depends on. Actually, this is due to the MP4 files codec: DaVinci Resolve prefers rending or delivering MPEG-4 codecs instead of others while MP4 can contain various video codecs. So if your MP4 files are not accepted by Resolve, it's probably because of the video codec incompatibility.

Since Resolve supports creating Proxies or Intermediaries for Offline or Online Editing. The two kinds of workflows are:

Proxies – low quality clips edited and then relinked to their 'originals' for mastering – offline editing.
Intermediary clips like Prores or DNxHD – high quality clips edited and mastered directly – online editing.

To work with proxies, you'll need some way to ensure the file names and properties are kept intact. Otherwise, relinking them will be hell. And you create intermediaries using the steps below.

To get MP4 files work with DaVinci Resolve perfectly, you need to transcode MP4 to DaVinci Resolve more edit-friendly format like DNxHD or Apple Prores .mov. Dimo Video Converter Ultimate for Mac can be of great help in this task.

With it, you can effortlessly transcode 720p/1080p/2k/4k MP4 files to DNxHD or Prores for Resolve on Mac(OS High Sierra included) without losing quality. Besides MP4, this video convert program can also help to convert between any popular video and audio formats like MTS, MXF, H.265, MKV, VOB, AVI, WMV, etc. as you need. Plus, with the built-in video editing feature of the program, you can trim, crop, add watermark, adjust effect and more to your video files. If you are running on Windows, get Dimo Video Converter Ultimate. Now just,download the program and achieve your goal smoothly.

Free Trial Free Trial

people have downloaded it

Converting MP4 files for Editing in DaVinci Resolve Smoothly

Step 1: Add MP4 video files

Install and launch the top MP4 Video Converter, and then click "Add File" button to import your MP4 files to the software.

Tip: If you wanna preview MP4 video clips, you can double click it to play MP4 with the builti-in video player.

MP4 video converter for DR

Step 2: Select DaVinci Resolve friendly format as output format

Hit "Select Format" bar to select output format. You can choose "Format > Editor" and choose "DNxHD 720P" "DNxHD 1080P" or "Apple Prores" as output format. It is an ideal editing format for Resolve, FCP or Premiere Pro.

Step 3: Determine you video resolution, bit rate, frame rate, etc.

Click "Settings" button if you'd like to customize advanced audio and video parameters like Video Codec, aspect ratio, bit rate, frame rate, Audio codec, sample rate, audio channels.

Notice that you can not "convert up" video quality. If you selected HD Video in Step 2, we advise you to adjust the A/V parameters to be the same with source MP4 videos so as to bear least quality loss at proper file size. To cut down file size, you may set down video bit rate, the lower bit rate you set the smaller file size you get. Do not forget to click "OK" to confirm your settings. Then type in a desired output location in the "Output folder" box.

DNxHD video settings

Step 4: Do basic video editing (optional)

This Mac video converter has some simple edit functions like cropping, splitting, adding effects etc. so you can touch up the video with basic video editing functions.

Step 5: Convert MP4 videos to DaVinci Resolve friendly video format.

Click the "Start" button, the converter will start encoding MP4 for importing to DaVinci Resolve. Soon after the conversion is finished, just click "Open" button to get the generated files for editing in DaVinci Resolve 12/11/10/9 without any hassle.

How to Import/Ingesst converted Video into DaVinci

1. In order to import media from your media storage to the media pool, you have to select the media that you want to upload and then just drag it to the media pool.

Media import

2. If you get a pop up message that asks you if you want to change the frame rate of the timeline to the frame rate of your media because they don't match, you should click on "Change".

Change framerate