DR 18 -Render Time Increasing Infinitely But Sporadically

Ever since I went to Resolve 18 on Big Sur things have been buggy. I'll provide specs if need be but last time I was having an issue (sound randomly muted) it didn't really go anywhere on the support thread so I gave up. As of today, I began having issues rendering a section of video with the counter increasing endlessly. If I Force Quit and re-open it tends to be fine again...until an edit or change is applied and then I re-render. I moved the data to an NVMe SSD to confirm it wasn't drive speed, then updated to the latest 18.4, then purged the cache. Still, just happened once more. Now re-rendering again, and this time it was successful. I searched the archives and found others who had been through the same issue dating back to at least 2014, but never got any conclusive answers besides purging the cache or using known good, fast drives. Is there a system report I should submit somewhere? Should I just uninstall Resolve 18 altogether and re-install? I'm in the middle of a major project so a clean install of macOS isn't in my immediate future, and if I can get a conclusive answer on this without having to do something that major, it would help.

Thanks.

Sean

Short question I want to be careful to not sound negative, critical, or passive-aggressive in the least. Is there any other thread or place where I should be posting technical questions?

I only ask since it's been a couple more days without any follow-up, and the previous issue last August never got resolved either, so if I'm doing something wrong or should be posting tech reports somewhere else, or calling a phone number instead of anything else, please let me know! I'm hoping/wondering/thinking the render issue might have been as simple as switching the Render preset from Custom to "H.264 Master." I've got to film and edit some more footage today so I guess I'll see how it goes.

Ever since I went to Resolve 18 on Big Sur things have been buggy. I'll provide specs if need be but last time I was having an issue (sound randomly muted) it didn't really go anywhere on the support thread so I gave up. As of today, I began having issues rendering a section of video with the counter increasing endlessly. If I Force Quit and re-open it tends to be fine again...until an edit or change is applied and then I re-render. I moved the data to an NVMe SSD to confirm it wasn't drive speed, then updated to the latest 18.4, then purged the cache. Still, just happened once more. Now re-rendering again, and this time it was successful.

Any reason you're sticking with Big Sur? Why not update to Monterey?

What specific source material are you using? What are your timeline settings? What format are you trying to render it to? Are there any Fusion compositions in the timeline?

A 'clean install' is not the same as an upgrade. MacOS can be upgraded while leaving your data intact.
Nevertheless, a backup is advised. If you insist to stay with Big Sur, try to render into ProRes, if you used another codec before.

Thanks for the reply. To keep this answer short:

Any reason you're sticking with Big Sur? Why not update to Monterey?

Because I'm on a late 2019 MBP that shipped with Catalina, which was STABLE for 18 months, I only reluctantly upgraded to Big Sur out of necessity to update the BMPCC firmware/software version (and to upgrade to DR18), which took about 3-weeks (literally) of painstaking energy, issues with the SoftRaid application (housing my ThunderBay Flex 8 storage device), learning everything I could about macOS updates and becoming further disenchanted, all to do an in-situ update in the end, at which point....I lost another 2 days to Adobe Creative Cloud which literally broke and took another couple days with support entering my computer to manually trash and fix a whole bunch of library files. I realize this answer sounds more like a rant than an answer which was not the intention at all...it's as simple as that OS updates are the bane of my existence. Every single time.

What specific source material are you using? What are your timeline settings? What format are you trying to render it to? Are there any Fusion compositions in the timeline?

.BRAW shot in 6k, 60fps. Timeline at 3840x2160 Ultra HD. Anything above that and I didn't give Apple enough money but demanding as it may be, I get reasonable playback performance at that and it works for me while editing. No Fusion compositions. Simple edits. No animations. Default settings under the "Custom Export" tab in Deliver is set to QuickTime, H.264 Codec.

It really only became an issue the other day and had never happened once before that. I'll keep an eye out on it and report back if this becomes an ongoing issue

A 'clean install' is not the same as an upgrade. MacOS can be upgraded while leaving your data intact.
Nevertheless, a backup is advised. If you insist to stay with Big Sur, try to render into ProRes, if you used another codec before.

Thanks for the reply. The reason I said "clean install" was quite literally, to start over fresh, if the issues were on account of corrupted library/preferences/back-end files or something else like happened with my Adobe applications (see my reply above for that wreck of a story....at that time, I was able to confirm from my bootable backup that the issue had seemed to begin prior to the OS update, which seems worth mentioning out of full transparency).

True, a clean install of a major version is always good to get rid of garbage.
But in your situation, an upgrade may help.