All kinds of problems editing

I'm learning Davinci Resolve 12.5.6 and working on a test project with a mixture of 4K and HD footage. My 4K footage was shot with a Panasonic FZ100, is H.264 and 3840 x 2160. All of my media and music files are stored on an external USB 3.0 drive which is always connected to the computer. Everything seemed to be fine the first few days I was editing. After not editing for a few days I loaded the project and encountered the following issues:

1. All of my Media was Offline and needed to be relinked.

2. I played my timelines and noticed my music had no sound. The music files appeared green in the timeline without the waveworm.

After relinking the footage that day everything video-wise seemed to function correctly. However, I could not get the music files to play properly with sound. I tried relinking the audio but this did not work.

The next day I loaded the project again and just one clip was offline in the Media window and its bin. It too doesn't have any audio in the media window. This clip is present in the timeline and has audio.

I also imported one of the problem music clips onto a new audio track and that new one seems to play normally.

QUESTIONS:

Are any of these occurrences normal? If so, why?

What's causing this to happen?

Does footage always have to be constantly relinked? The first several days I edited I didn't have to relink my footage.

Why won't the audio play properly? Is there a specific way to relink audio files or is there a problem I'm unaware of?

Thanks.

test project with a mixture of 4K and HD footage.

If it's a big project, the usual way one would do this would be to transcode all your footage to an easy to edit format: IE DNxHD36 at 1920X1080, edit, and then relink back to your camera essence once you have locked your cut. You'll need to read up on "conforming" in the manual. How you assign your reelnames is a big deal.

All of my Media was Offline and needaed to be relinked.

Hard to diagnose without knowing your setup - operating system, is the media on external drives, a raid, a nas, a san etc.

2. I played my timelines and noticed my music had no sound. The music files appeared green in the timeline without the waveworm.

What version of resolve are you using? I know I have had issues with broadcast wave files in the past. Resolve 12.5 responds better to AIF files.

Are any of these occurrences normal? If so, why?

Highly dependent on your configuration, where and how you're storing your media files. I've been using Resolve to edit for a while now. It is not Premiere. It is very specific and has its quirks. Once I ironed out how I needed to organize things, it works well. A test project is the way to go.

Hi Justin,

Thanks for your feedback. My answers are below.

"If it's a big project, the usual way one would do this would be to transcode all your footage to an easy to edit format: IE DNxHD36 at 1920X1080, edit, and then relink back to your camera essence once you have locked your cut. You'll need to read up on "conforming" in the manual. How you assign your reelnames is a big deal."

DNxHD36 is not one of the available formats for me to use. Please see the photo I uploaded with the different optimization options.

What other format would you recommend?

Is there another method to transcode the footage besides optimizing it in DaVinci?

"Hard to diagnose without knowing your setup - operating system, is the media on external drives, a raid, a nas, a san etc."

I am using Windows 10, with an external 3.0 USB hard drive.

"What version of resolve are you using? I know I have had issues with broadcast wave files in the past. Resolve 12.5 responds better to AIF files."

I am using version 12.5.6.

The audio files are MP3s, downloaded from YouTube's audio production library.

How do I convert the MP3 audio files to AIFs?

"Highly dependent on your configuration, where and how you're storing your media files. I've been using Resolve to edit for a while now. It is not Premiere. It is very specific and has its quirks. Once I ironed out how I needed to organize things, it works well. A test project is the way to go."

My media files are stored on the external drive.

I am using Windows 10, with an external 3.0 USB hard drive.

The missing media is likely an issue with remounting your external drive. Windows will often assign a different drive letter depending on what you have going on (restarts, drive removed then remounted, other drives being attached.) Resolve is looking for media at the exact same path.

The audio files are MP3s, downloaded from YouTube's audio production library.

I would convert those to AIFs. I have has issues with mp3s and wavs in resolve. AIFs behave well.

In terms of your workflow, you have a couple of choices: offline/online workflow or, as you have highlighted, optimize media:

- offline/online is complex to setup, but once it's there, its a very safe, portable and predictable workflow. You'll want to lookup some tutorials on offine/online workflow and check out the manual

- optimize media is easy peasy, but can fail if you move or change your resolve cache folder. In the main resolve preferences, you will need to specify a location for your resolve media and cache. make sure it's not on a drive for which the drive letter will change. DNxHD LB works well on slower systems.

Goatseyeview is a good starting point for tutorials. It's free, granular, thorough and she makes things quite clear: https://www.youtube.com/user/goatseyeviewUK/videos

- J

Are any of these occurrences normal? If so, why?

What's causing this to happen?

Yes and because you're using highly compressed formats which aren't designed for editing and post.

Justin already answered everything, but I wanted to confirm that editing with mp3's and h.264 files is never a good idea and will put too much strain on Resolve causing it to start behaving weirdly as your project gets more and more complex.

You could try Resolve 14 (still in beta) which has a better engine and can supposedly handle highly compressed formats more easily....but keep in mind that it's a beta version and not everything is working the way it should.

I am using Windows 10, with an external 3.0 USB hard drive.

The missing media is likely an issue with remounting your external drive. Windows will often assign a different drive letter depending on what you have going on (restarts, drive removed then remounted, other drives being attached.) Resolve is looking for media at the exact same path.

The audio files are MP3s, downloaded from YouTube's audio production library.

I would convert those to AIFs. I have has issues with mp3s and wavs in resolve. AIFs behave well.

In terms of your workflow, you have a couple of choices: offline/online workflow or, as you have highlighted, optimize media:

- offline/online is complex to setup, but once it's there, its a very safe, portable and predictable workflow. You'll want to lookup some tutorials on offine/online workflow and check out the manual

- optimize media is easy peasy, but can fail if you move or change your resolve cache folder. In the main resolve preferences, you will need to specify a location for your resolve media and cache. make sure it's not on a drive for which the drive letter will change. DNxHD LB works well on slower systems.

Goatseyeview is a good starting point for tutorials. It's free, granular, thorough and she makes things quite clear: https://www.youtube.com/user/goatseyeviewUK/videos

- J

Thanks Justin,

Will these new optimized files overwrite the current ones, or would it be better to create a new project or timeline to test this theory?

What would you consider a fast and slow edit system?

Are any of these occurrences normal? If so, why?

What's causing this to happen?

Yes and because you're using highly compressed formats which aren't designed for editing and post.

Justin already answered everything, but I wanted to confirm that editing with mp3's and h.264 files is never a good idea and will put too much strain on Resolve causing it to start behaving weirdly as your project gets more and more complex.

You could try Resolve 14 (still in beta) which has a better engine and can supposedly handle highly compressed formats more easily....but keep in mind that it's a beta version and not everything is working the way it should.

Thanks Kays,

Will these new optimized files overwrite the current ones, or would it be better to create a new project or timeline to test this theory?

No, they just create new files. Check out the manual/tuts.

What would you consider a fast and slow edit system?

It's relative to what you want to do. I do mostly stuff using uncompressed DPX sequences in HD and 4K and bit of camera stuff. I'm currently using resolve as an NLE for a multicam concert film and it's running very very well for me. I run an 8c intel i7 OCed to 4ghz with a single GTX 1080 and NVMe storage that runs at about 1500MB/s. I can do sick amounts of stuff realtime in HD and 2K, including some simple layering and compositing work. 4K less so. I use the cache a lot when I get back to the media essence in 4K.

If you're running off of an external USB3 drive, that is a serious bottleneck. Your GPU is also an important factor. You should have no issue with anything, though, if you edit using optimized or transcoded offline media at DNxHD36 or LB.

As Kays mentioned, most systems are going to bog down with highly compress media from cameras.

Work your way through some tuts and sections of the manual that concern your workflow. Look at offline/online workflows, caching, and optimized media. It's really not Premiere.

- J

Will these new optimized files overwrite the current ones, or would it be better to create a new project or timeline to test this theory?

No, they just create new files. Check out the manual/tuts.

What would you consider a fast and slow edit system?

It's relative to what you want to do. I do mostly stuff using uncompressed DPX sequences in HD and 4K and bit of camera stuff. I'm currently using resolve as an NLE for a multicam concert film and it's running very very well for me. I run an 8c intel i7 OCed to 4ghz with a single GTX 1080 and NVMe storage that runs at about 1500MB/s. I can do sick amounts of stuff realtime in HD and 2K, including some simple layering and compositing work. 4K less so. I use the cache a lot when I get back to the media essence in 4K.

If you're running off of an external USB3 drive, that is a serious bottleneck. Your GPU is also an important factor. You should have no issue with anything, though, if you edit using optimized or transcoded offline media at DNxHD36 or LB.

As Kays mentioned, most systems are going to bog down with highly compress media from cameras.

Work your way through some tuts and sections of the manual that concern your workflow. Look at offline/online workflows, caching, and optimized media. It's really not Premiere.

- J

Thanks for all of your feedback.

I'm curious to you know if 1920 x 1080 HD footage causes these same problems as 3840 x 2160 4K footage if both are H.264 format?

How would you rate an Intel i7 4Ghz with a single GTX 1070?

Ahahah. Well it is somewhere between a laptop and a mutligpu Linux system. It does what I need it to and I am not often frustrated by its performance.

A trick that I have found with optimized media is to set your timeline resolution to the raster size of the optimized media files.

For example, if my source footage is UHD and I created 1/4 rez optimized media, then if I'm still getting poor playback, I'll set my timeline resolution to 960 X 540. This works MUCH BETTER than enabling Proxy Mode, which I've found to be pretty useless or even maybe detrimental.

I created 1/4 rez optimized media, then if I'm still getting poor playback, I'll set my timeline resolution to 960 X 540. This works MUCH BETTER than enabling Proxy Mode

Awesome! Thanks for that.

A trick that I have found with optimized media is to set your timeline resolution to the raster size of the optimized media files.

For example, if my source footage is UHD and I created 1/4 rez optimized media, then if I'm still getting poor playback, I'll set my timeline resolution to 960 X 540. This works MUCH BETTER than enabling Proxy Mode, which I've found to be pretty useless or even maybe detrimental.

Thanks Peter,

Why do you feel proxy mode is useless?

Regarding the example you are citing, what is the original resolution of the footage?

Howie, so in the example I gave, the original source footage was UHD. And 1/4 rez of UHD is 960 X 540.

As for enabling Proxy Mode, I've never had it improve performance. I've tried 1/2 and 1/4 resolution, and each seems to do nothing. I've also monitored the CPU, GPU and disk usage, and I can see no improvement, and sometimes it looked like there was a slight degradation in performance.

FWIU, Proxy mode senses when your GPU is maxing out and the starts sending lower resolution frames to it for processing. But I've never noticed any benefit.

So Optimized Media at a lower resolution like 1/2 or 1/4 rez DNxHR SQ for is great. And if I'm still not finding good performance, I'll lower the timeline resolution to 1/2, 1/4 or even 1/8 of the original source file's resolution.

(When using Optimized Media, I find it ideal to have the timeline resolution equal to or less than the resolution of the Optimized Media. But if I'm toggling Use Optimized Media if Available on/off a lot, I might use a higher timeline resolution that matches the original source files.)

Hope that helps.

Howie, so in the example I gave, the original source footage was UHD. And 1/4 rez of UHD is 960 X 540.

As for enabling Proxy Mode, I've never had it improve performance. I've tried 1/2 and 1/4 resolution, and each seems to do nothing. I've also monitored the CPU, GPU and disk usage, and I can see no improvement, and sometimes it looked like there was a slight degradation in performance.

FWIU, Proxy mode senses when your GPU is maxing out and the starts sending lower resolution frames to it for processing. But I've never noticed any benefit.

So Optimized Media at a lower resolution like 1/2 or 1/4 rez DNxHR SQ for is great. And if I'm still not finding good performance, I'll lower the timeline resolution to 1/2, 1/4 or even 1/8 of the original source file's resolution.

(When using Optimized Media, I find it ideal to have the timeline resolution equal to or less than the resolution of the Optimized Media. But if I'm toggling Use Optimized Media if Available on/off a lot, I might use a higher timeline resolution that matches the original source files.)

Hope that helps.

Peter,

Thanks for all of your feedback.

Thank you for the Thank you!

And I would set the timeline resolution back to full rez before QCing, doing VFX, rendering, etc.