Network Optimization - What does this do?

Can anyone shed any light on the mechanics behind this new render option? Nothing in the manual as far as I can see.

I have had an issue with my network drives force ejecting while Resolve has been rendering onto them. This has been since version 12 and only happens with Resolve, never with any any other editing or disk speed tests etc. This new option in 14 so far seems to have solved this ... although probably as a weird side effect.

Rendering happens at pretty much normal speed but it takes a long time stuck at 99% before completing, no network drive ejects though.

It would be nice to know what this feature is doing so I can have a better idea what's been going on.

Thanks!

thats an interesting question! i would like to know as well!

i am rendering to a nas and tried the option, but it sticked at 99%, and then i gave up and rendered it without the option,
and everything was fine. if i knew what is behind this option, i could figure out if it would make sense nonetheless... now, that i know that it gets to 100% if one waits long enough...

Alexis Van Hurkman mentioned (in a Ripple Training tutorial) that it allows someone to begin viewing the first part of the file while rendering was going on but he wasn't that clear on it.

I could be wrong, but:

AFAIK, the MP4 container has a non-constant-length "metadata" section of the file. Because of this, it's more convenient to write out the audio/video streams in full, then write the metadata at the end of the file. However, this causes problems when streaming online (on some HTTP servers, anyway) where the browser, looking for the metadata section (which is at the end of the file), will have to download the entire file before it can begin playback.

"Network Optimization" simply places this bit of metadata at the beginning of the file so that no matter what is reading the file, it'll always get to the metadata section first and be able to decode the audio/video streams as they come in.

I believe this option is for networking.
If you have 2 machines and setup a network between them,
then you can use this option.

If it's the same optimization from the early days of QT and dialup modems, it used to be that if a file wasn't optimized, your viewer had to download the entire file before they could start to watch anything. Checking streaming optimization or whatever it was called would create a file that would allow the viewer to watch the video as it was coming in. In the modem days that was a massive improvement since video took forever and if they had nothing to look at while it downloaded, your audience would leave. YouTube and such do this automatically when they reencode your content.