DaVinci Resolve -- Importing Consumer Audio

DaVinci Resolve is a wonderful piece of software for editing and processing video, and is available to anyone for free.  However, it is designed for professionals, not (us) amateurs.  So, support for consumer file formats is sparse, and what is there can be picky.  That doesn't mean consumers cannot use DaVinci Resolve with our footage, but it does mean we need to process our video and audio before we can import it into DaVinci Resolve.  Here are my best suggestions for speed and quality.

Tools

I'll mention use of specific tools below.  Here is the list with links:

• ffmpeg - https://ffmpeg.org/

Audio

It's not really BlackMagic Design's fault that some audio formats are unsupported.  After all, they are giving away the software for free.  And if you were giving something away for free and someone came up and said that to include support for a particular format in your free product, you'd have to pay a license fee, you'd probably balk at the idea as well.  Well, that's (I'm guessing) what's happened here.  MP3 and AC3 are two common audio formats.  However, these formats are (have been) encumbered by patents that force(d) vendors to pay for licenses to use them in products like DaVinci Resolve.  (Don't get me started on how underhanded it is to manipulate an industry standard so it uses your intellectual property and you can get paid by anyone who wants to be compatible with...well, everyone else.)  So if BlackMagic Designs included support for these formats in DaVinci Resolve, they would have (had) to pay a license fee.  Did I mention that DaVinci Resolve is free?

That said, I do fault BlackMagic Designs for not bothering to tell the user any of this when loading video files.  If you import an MTS file (see this blog post), and it uses AC3 audio (which many camcorders choose instead of the AAC audio format from the MPEG-4 specification), DaVinci Resolve will happily import the video and completely ignore the audio.  No warning.  No error.  No notification of any kind.  But I'm telling you here, what's going on.  It does not support AC3 (Dolby Digital).

[Note that as of the date of the last update to this document, WikiPedia indicates that all AC3 & MP3 patents have expired.  However, see the note at the top of this blog post for why I haven't been able to check whether support for AC3 and/or MP3 has been added in recent updates to DaVinci Resolve.]

So for both types of files, you will need to convert these to a format DaVinci Resolve can handle, and import the results separately.  I prefer RIFF WAV files, which are easy to manipulate under Windows, but you can use any format DaVinci Resolve handles.  Uncompressed formats would be the best choice, because you would not be re-compressing the audio and losing more quality.

ffmpeg is the easiest choice to convert the audio, and its available for all the major platforms:

    ffmpeg -i in.MTS -vn -codec:a pcm_s16le out.wav
    ffmpeg -i in.MP3 -codec:a pcm_s16le out.wav