Why is this beta version so buggy?

I mean, honestly, what does black magic do to make things that used to work fine break and others stop working? Is the program always written from scratch or something overwritten? how does this work?

Adrian, what exactly do you think is the meaning of the word BETA VERSION?

And if you say it is so buggy - what is it that used to work fine and now stops working?
It is of course fair to criticize, but some context is needed.

BTW, I am still on Resolve 17 on my productive systems. I don't like living on the edge when it comes to deadlines.

BETA VERSION

of course I know what a beta is, I mean THIS BETA VERSION 18.5. It's often more problematic than other previous beta versions, even than 16 BETA which also had bugs at the beginning, I just hope BMD will work hard as always and fix all the bugs so we can have a masterpiece like they always do! They do a great job and it's worrying to see when these complicated betas come out.

Is the program always written from scratch or something overwritten? how does this work?

Software development suffers from this and has come up with ways to deal with it. Like test driven development (you write a test for a code, then the actual code), scrum in one sense, extreme programming and so forth. Looking at their release schedule, I guess they use scrum or some other development method.

But the case being, Resolve (and other huge programs) have so much code that testing everything when in use in almost limitless different computer configurations is really hard. Or maybe they decided they want to put out a buggy (or less tested) version so that some other features get more testing sooner - I don't know.

Only Blackmagic can tell what code had to change for the changes in this latest beta, maybe there were things that touched many different codepaths, maybe they use some new underlying framework functionality that works slightly different.

But as this is a beta version, you can and are encouraged to report the bugs you encounter so they can hopefully be fixed in the next versions.

Bugs are there, it is inevitable. What isn't inevitable is how the bug reporting and release notes are handled. BMD could do better. Release notes contain very generic reports about "improvements" and "addressing issues" and so forth with no connection to actual reported bugs, so it is impossible to know what exactly was fixed when there are severeal related issues known even in this forum. And frequently many changes don't even make it to release notes.

BETA VERSION

of course I know what a beta is, I mean THIS BETA VERSION 18.5. It's often more problematic than other previous beta versions, even than 16 BETA which also had bugs at the beginning, I just hope BMD will work hard as always and fix all the bugs so we can have a masterpiece like they always do! They do a great job and it's worrying to see when these complicated betas come out.

It's a beta version of 18.5 It's essentially a new version Resolve. Just like 17 beta had bugs, 18 had bugs. It's not stable. That's the point of it being a beta.

BETA is BETA, not final version. It is for testing and looking for the bugs in it. I think it is normal for BETA if it has so many bugs.
Hopefully BMD adds feature to install BETA version seperate from FINAL VERSION, so we can install TWO VERSION in ONE machine.

Hello,
I am very careful with update and mostly with annouced BETA version.
I made a backup of my libraries, updated DVR to 18.5 and tested it during 3 days and I am very pleased with the result. In my case, no crashes, the most important features are working well (subtitles, script, relight, multimerge, usd import and timeline backups.
My only regreat is the lack of french in script and subtitle.
So I decided to stay with 18.5 and updated my project.
Perhaps the amount of GPU (24 Go) is the reason for the stability.
BlackMagic, nice work.
Jacques

As a director of software engineering, I can tell you that any piece of software has bugs. If the development group can wait long enough the bug count can be dramatically reduced, but never to 0.

Most users want their bug fixed right away, rather than in the next release. Every release, even if only 1 change is required needs to be fully tested. Murphy’s Law pretty much guarantees that a single change in 1 place will break something in a completely different place that has “nothing” to do with the change.

The test time cost means that some amount of batching is the most sensible and efficient way to do releases. Beta testing offers an opportunity to test a release under a greater variety of work flows, and speed the final release.

All operating systems - Mac, iOS, Windows, and Linux have the same problems. For production systems a prudent workflow will not use the initial production release, but wait for the “.1” release.

[Rohit Gupta]

I mean, honestly, what does black magic do to make things that used to work fine break and others stop working? Is the program always written from scratch or something overwritten? how does this work?

So what’s the issue you are running into? Please provide details, including system details, OS etc, and if you can provide logs, etc that will be useful for us to investigate the issue.

I am having problems with Relight crashing. I am unable to use it. It will load on an empty Node but as soon as I add Relight to a footage node it immediately crashes. Any ideas?

I am having problems with Relight crashing. I am unable to use it. It will load on an empty Node but as soon as I add Relight to a footage node it immediately crashes. Any ideas?

Provide system details (see my signature for example) and a bit about your footage and timeline settings. Could be that your system is running out of VRAM due to a misbehaving GPU drive, etc.