Minimum hardware required to edit 1080p video

Hi,
I've been working with Resolve for a while now. It's a really cool program!

Sadly the update to version 14 made my performance much worse. In 12.5 I was able to edit and color 1080 DNxHD pretty smoothely. Now that version 14 is out there should be an increase in performance (as Blackmagic told us). Resolve now keeps crashing every 5 minutes or so even though I'm only in the edit tab. I have no coloring applied.
I know my computer is by far not ideal for editing and coloring but what bugs me is that it used to work just fine. (you can see my specs in my signature)
I would go back to Resolve 12.5 but I don't think there is a way.
When the crashes happen the ram (not maxed out) and disk usage (sometimes maxed out) is quiet high. Cpu is about 20-40%. The gpu seems to only be used rarely at 5%, sometimes 30%.
When I zoom in on the timeline Resolve basically freezes to process the zoom. This takes about 10 seconds. During this the disk, cpu and gpu aren't maxed out. Only the ram is about 70%.

Do you have any idea if there is a way to fix this? Would you say that an SSD is a must? What would be the most important to upgrade? Or are there any settings I could change?


Thanks for every help!

Hello Leonhard. Three things that will help. You need to upgrade your GPU. That AMD card is seriously underpowered. I would suggest an nvidia card as you can then take advantage of CUDA. Though I only have a card with 2gb of memory it seems to work well, but one with 4gb would be even better. You will also find that increasing your RAM to a least 16gb will help. Also a separate SSD or 7200rpm hard drive for your video files will help speed up things.
On my system I am no problems editing and grading 1080 50p h264 and mp4 video.

Thanks Charles.
Upgrading the gpu (to a gtx 1050ti, 4gb), the ram (to 24gb) and adding an SSD (only one for programs and the OS) is on my list.
How has your experience been with the update to Davini Resolve 14? Have you got an improvement in performance?

I now moved all the media files of the project to an external USB 3.0 drive. During playback and when the crashes happen the usage of this external drive is quiet low. Only my ram and HDD (which runs Resolve and WIN 10) peak before Resolve crashes. That's what seems so strange to me.
Do you have Resolve running on a seperate SSD?

I will know try to convert all the media to the performance friendliest format possible.

Hello Leonhard. The main thing I noticed is the much improved performance of h264 files when scrubbing. To get the real speed improvements I think you need the Studio version. Not had a crash with any of the 14 betas or this first release. Resolve in installed on my system drive which is a 7200rpm spinner. I also have a small SSD on which I place my files to be edited. I also have an external usb2 spinner for files which works well. I don't bother with optimised media as, so far, I have had no problems with the mp4 files from my camera.
What operation are you doing when Resolve crashes?

That's strange. I experienced crashes regularly with 14 betas. Because of that I always switched back to 12.5 where the same projects would run properly. I hoped that with the final release of 14 it would have been fixed.
You wrote that in order to get the full performance you would have to get the studio version. Do you know exactly what's different there?

Resolve crashes when it's playing back my timeline. At the moment I'm working on a breakdown of my work which involves many images. I started with png and converted them now to jpg since I guess they need less computing power. I have a total of 6 video tracks and 2 audio tracks. 5 video tracks for the pngs (as I have to stack them up sometimes because some of them have alpha) and one for footage which is in "m2ts". Maybe Resolve doesn't like that format or codec?
In an older project I opened Resolve 14 started crashing as soon as it had to generate titles. The HDD starts to peak and the program stops working.
I disabled my antivirus software and firewall. Also I disabled windows media player since it caused a lot of disk usage. Sadly this didn't bring about an improvement.

I just reinstalled Resolve 12.5. So far I had no problems with the images. And the performance is way better!

Pretty strange behaviour though. Maybe there are still some bugs in Resolve 14.

Thanks for you help Charles!

I would try to have a look at the new Resolve configuration guide that was published and stickied in this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=62582

Windows Home might not be the right choice. Under Windows, I got the impression that OpenCL was supposed to perform as well as CUDA, but they are not the same.

You don't mention any outboard Video I/O interface, so are you attempting to grade using the UI as a judgement reference?

You have an AVID sound card in the stack, which -- I have my doubts about, considering Fairlight has been added to the R14 application.

It is true that Resolve uses the system CPU for image decoding -- highly compressed formats do take a significant amount of processing time. Resolve is not simply a "playback" application -- it is also doing all the math involved in colorspace management and image re-compute which should be taking place on the largest, fastest GPU you can afford.

jPO, CSI

Hi,
thanks for your suggestions!

I am not that deep into video hardware. So I have some questions to your post:

What OS would you recommend? What are the benefits of changing?

Why would I need an outboard video interface? For better color representation or will it change the performance?

Why do you think that an audio interface from AVID shouldn't be supported? Also I didn't use it when I was testing Resolve 14. I had it turned off and the sound was coming from my mainboard.


No offense here - your suggestions might be all true and helpful. The thing I don't understand is the worse performance comparing to version 12.5. The project that caused crashes every 5mins works perfectly with higher fps in 12.5 .