iPad pro m4 performance

Hi,
I am testing DR on iPad incl. IAP workflow. Using the latest iPad pro 11, base model. I don't want to do something fancy just cutting dailies, sorting clips in timelines, bins etc. No fx etc.

Unfortunately the timeline performance is far from ideal.
I work with sony h.264 25p 4k slog3 footage. Copied to an ssd or the internal iPad ssd makes no difference. There is a noticeable lag during simple playback between cuts/edits on the timeline. It almost stutters on every cut. Playback start is often sluggish too.

I tried proxies from in camera and proxy generator, that works just fine, but involves more footage and work... I hoped that I could use the files directly from the camera, like I do on my mac laptop all the time without any problems.

I checked different settings in the app, performance mode/on off, different memory usage settings, hardware h.264 encoding on/off, timeline resolution down to 720p, timeline proxy resolution down to 1/4 via shortcut key - all without any improvement.

Anybody tried sony 4k h.264 material editing on the iPad version? Is it maybe not optimised to work on that new m4 chip? Might that change when DR19 is out on iPad? Thanks for any tips.

Another minor problem I have with the interface using the magic keyboard/trackpad is that resolve often interprets my timeline scrubbing and resting as a long press and shows the context menu in the edit page. Would be great to have an option to disable the long press / context menu appearance if a keyboard/trackpad/mouse is connected.

Andre.

Disappointing. I guess you only have 8GB RAM on that iPad. BMD recommends 16GB for Resolve. Could this be the issue?

Yes that could be the issue, but I guess the bottleneck here is somewhere else in the h.264 decoding.

My iPad Pro M2, but with 16G and 1T drive has no problems playing multicam 1920x1080 60P project using GH6 5.7K 60P Vlog , GH5S C4K 60P Vlog and AX100 HD 60P XAVC. I see little difference from my Studio Max in performance. It will even Airplay to my TV. I do not have any Sony files to check if that is also a problem. The GH6 files are 10bit H265, the others h264. I think the RAM is important or it will have to swap to SSD and if that too is small it will have difficulty processing.

Hi,

Another M4 iPad Pro 11 Inch user here and I'm also having performance issues. In my case, I'm working with 720p footage in a 720p timeline. I work from a NAS, works pretty well from my ancient laptop and both iPad and laptop are connecting via the Wi-Fi so I don't want to think it's because of that...
It's very choppy when transitioning between clips, like its trying to read the media at the exact moment its supposed to start playing rather than preparing in advance.

It's the same even with very small projects (still 720p) so I don't think the RAM is to blame either. (Although I do have long term concerns about only 3.7GB of RAM being available to Davinci)

If I can't resolve (pun) this, I might take my iPad back and wait until the next one comes out when (hopefully) Davinci is more optimised.

I think you need 16G to run Resolve successfully and I wish Blackmagic had made this more clear. I have had no problems with 1920x1080 project using C4K and 5.7K 60P Vlog files from my Panasonic GH cameras with source on a portable SSD attached to the iPad. I even clean feed to my TV to check colour as I am the client so how it looks on my TV is important.

If that is really the case, its a real shame... limits Davinci to those willing to shell out $1600 minimum.
I'd heard good things about Davinci on the M2 iPads (not sure if those reviewers were all using 16GB models or not).
For it to not even handle a simple transition between two 72op clips on a single track... I feel like something has to be wrong.

Have you tried that from an SSD directly attached.

So I have the 11" M4 256 gb 8 gb Ram since day 1 and I have done several tests on this. I thought this could be my second device for editing (while traveling or something) but I think it can't be. I'll explain why.

My main camera is a Fujifilm XH2s and I always work with 6.2k footage, Flog-2. I tend to use basic effects on DR like stabilization, Deflicker on some shots where the light is not mine to control, slow-mo, Voice Isolation, and most importantly color grading.

So working with 6.2k footage is impossible, it always crashes no matter what I do.

4k footage is a little bit better because I did a full day edit on the iPad with hub, monitor, keyboard, and mouse it was flawless until the next day when it crashed a lot.

I opened another project with Proxys and it's flawless again, super smooth but I mean what's the point of having such a great Display from the iPad and not editing on higher resolutions, that's frustrating.

the information about this is so poor on the internet but when you search for "iPad pro DR crashes" you find a lot of comments about crashes on DR and no solutions for it, IDK if the 16 GB is as stable as people say, I doubt it. And if I knew this before the purchase I know I'd go with the 1TB + 16 GB if this one doesn't crashes.

Now I have a really expensive 11" Display to watch YouTube

Black magic really needs to start putting some love into this and optimizing for these blazing fast tablets. I called support and they basically didn’t know anything about the iPad version basically not even supported to the two techs I spoke with. Support this app and give it the attention it deserves!

If that is really the case, its a real shame... limits Davinci to those willing to shell out $1600 minimum.
I'd heard good things about Davinci on the M2 iPads (not sure if those reviewers were all using 16GB models or not).
For it to not even handle a simple transition between two 72op clips on a single track... I feel like something has to be wrong.

I’m running it on a 2018 iPad Pro with 4GB RAM. Very slow and nothing over 1080p. Only straight cuts. I’m not trying any transitions. It’s the free version. The fact that it runs at all is amazing. When Resolve for iPad first came out, BMD stated you need the 16GB iPad. Too rich for my blood. I use Luma Fusion quite successfully, on that old iPad.

Have you tried that from an SSD directly attached.

No, unfortunately I'm not kitted out for that. I've been doing all my editing on a NAS (Custom Build TrueNAS that is very capable) for a long time now. I wouldn't mind doing some editing on an SSD or even directly using the built in storage of the iPad, if only there was some kind of "pack and go" tool. eg/ a way to
1) Package up all of the media used in a project so far, as well as some assets I use universally in projects
2) Do the editing on the iPad
3) Re-merge everything back into the NAS version.

As far as I know, no such tool exists, although if I suspect it wouldn't be *that* hard to create a custom tool to do this.

Considering the iPad can happily play very high quality video from the NAS via both Plex and SMB, I really doubt this is limited by the iPad itself. I suspect that Davinci might not be optimised for it. What it probably needs to do is to start loading clips a few seconds before the play head reaches them and I guess it isn't doing that on iPad. I don't see why that would be any different to Windows though. (Would they have really gone to the trouble to change things like that on iPad? Maybe there is a good reason...). The NAS drives spin 24/7 so its not a spin-up delay either (plus, it works on Windows).

Surely its not the h.264 decoding either, my ancient windows machine is handling that fine, these are only 720p clips... Nevertheless, I will try converting all my clips to Prores before starting my next project as an experiment. (Sounds like that probably just good practice anyway?)

The other things I've tried is using Proxy Video Resolution (both half and Quarter) and it might have been a slight improvement(?) hard to tell, still not great even at Quarter.

I’m running it on a 2018 iPad Pro with 4GB RAM. Very slow and nothing over 1080p. Only straight cuts. I’m not trying any transitions. It’s the free version. The fact that it runs at all is amazing. When Resolve for iPad first came out, BMD stated you need the 16GB iPad. Too rich for my blood. I use Luma Fusion quite successfully, on that old iPad.

Just curious, have you found some way to use Davinci and Luma Fusion together in your workflow or did you end up switching to Lumafusion completely/doing Luma projects entirely on iPad, Davinci projects entirely on PC/Mac?

Daniel. Resolve has an archive function that will put everything used in a project into one folder at the location you choose.

Also there is a big difference between playing a video file and using in any NLE. The NLE usually will convert to its working format for use on the timeline for editing. This is the process that takes power from CPU and GPU so that editing features can be used. Different formats will need different capabilities. h264 and h265 do not need fast drives since the data rate is low and decode load is on the CPU and GPU however Prores or DNxHR need fast drives so will not work from your NAS over WiFi as the data rate is likely too much. In fact for those formats an SSD or a RAID of hard drives will work better.

I really think you should try a 1T WD passport drive . They are not expensive.

I’m running it on a 2018 iPad Pro with 4GB RAM. Very slow and nothing over 1080p. Only straight cuts. I’m not trying any transitions. It’s the free version. The fact that it runs at all is amazing. When Resolve for iPad first came out, BMD stated you need the 16GB iPad. Too rich for my blood. I use Luma Fusion quite successfully, on that old iPad.

Just curious, have you found some way to use Davinci and Luma Fusion together in your workflow or did you end up switching to Lumafusion completely/doing Luma projects entirely on iPad, Davinci projects entirely on PC/Mac?

If I need to bang out an edit on the iPad, I'll use Luma Fusion start to finish. I tried using Luma Fusion's export to Final Cut XML and then brought that into Resolve but there are glitches in that workflow and I haven't revisited it recently. Honestly, the USB-C connection to the iPad Pro 2018 is too slow to do large projects.

Daniel. Resolve has an archive function that will put everything used in a project into one folder at the location you choose.

Ah yes, I recall coming across the archive function when I looked into this in the past, but I couldn't see anything for remerging back into the original location, so I'd end up with two copies of everything?

Theoretically, if I got a 1TB external SSD, I wonder if I could use a file sync application to keep updating the NAS and SSD with the latest whenever I connect. iirc though, the media paths are stored explicitly not relatively to a root folder so I guess some path mapping would be required to make that work.

The alternative would be just switching to external SSD, maybe take a backup once in a while and worry about offline media problems if and when I ever needed the backup. Feels like going backwards though after building a NAS... (I used to use a lot of external HDDs)

Try looking into this:

https://www.stratospherix.com/products/ ... fessional/

It's not the quickest App on the block, but it gets the job done - even in the most weird environments.

Try the simple "Backup" or "Sync" options first. They usually do the trick. Manually or automatic. I prefer manual.

There is an option to solve really complicated tasks, and that works in the cases I have used, but you really won't want to start down that alley, unless you ned to.

I have used the paid version for years and years. iPhone and iPad, to SSD's, cloud, (s)ftp(s), https, NAS you name it, it works for my use cases. YMMV.

On a (near) daily basis, I have a couple of sync's I use to a local NAS (for every conceivable use case).

And a few intricate ones, that move ProRES videos from my iPhone 15 Pro (stored in Photos, Blackmagic folder and Cinema P3 folder), to an external drive, as well as a separate task, that performs a backup from one iPhone connected SSD to another SSD (both connected via an USB-C hub, that also works on my MacBook).

Regards

Daniel. I use my SSD purely for a project so that I can go between Studio Max, PC and iPad. Source is always backed up to a RAID 5 and when project is finished the SSD is formatted for the next projects. Sometimes this means relinking in the media page but that is not a problem as I keep all media for the project in one folder.