No Audio Waveforms!

I know this isn't the first time that the missing audio waveform issue has been posted, but I looked through everything and couldn't find a solution.

Yesterday I tried my first multicam project in Resolve Studio, and after 3 frustrating hours ended up going back to Premiere.

The multicam I was trying to create was from a 2 hour live event with 6 cameras. There was a variety of footage (ProRes, MXF, MP4), as well as a 24bit (48kHz) wav file.

My system is Windows 10. Resolve 15.1.1. i7 6850k. 1080 ti. 32GB ram.

My first issue was that Resolve would crash every time I would attempt to sync the clips by sound. Each time I would include less cameras when creating the multicam, until I got down to just two, and it would still crash. So, I thought I would just manually sync them, which is where my 2nd problem came up - Resolve wouldn't display audio waveforms. I couldn't see them in the Media page (with Waveform tab selected in the upper right), or in the Edit page (source viewer or timeline), and I couldn't see them in Fairlight.

The audio waveform wouldn't even show up for the .wav file.

But I could always hear the audio from all files -plus audio meters would bounce around.

I have "show audio waveforms" turned on in the media page. I have "show full clip audio waveform" turned on in the source viewer of the edit page, and I have audio waveforms turned on in the timeline view options.

I am pretty sure this is a bug, because one time when I restarted Resolve all the audio waveforms were there (except for one file) but after I created a new timeline they were all gone again, and I couldn't get them back.

Is there something I am missing? My cache path is valid. I can save stills, and cache media files no problem.

I really want to move over to Resolve as my NLE, but this makes it unusable. Any help is appreciated.

I have discovered the culprit of the audio waveforms not appearing in Reolve 15.1.1. With ProRes and MP4 the waveforms work as expected, but as soon as I import long .MXF files (from Sony PXW-X160 or PZW-Z150 cameras), all waveforms disappear (on both media and edit pages) and won't come back until I remove the .MXF files from the project and restart Resolve.

This is likely an incompatibility between the audio codecs. Smart render out each video individually, which in turn will make them all 16bit PCM. Except the MP4, you can try using it as is after you've unified the other pro grade formats.

You can even use resolve to render the 24bit wav to 16 bit, or use a program like SoundForge to convert it. Having different bit depths on the timeline will mess up the waveform, which is why it just disappears. Or alternatively make sure all your video files are 24 bit PCM.

More so than bit depth, sampling rates also need to be identical on the same timeline. If that need's done, I'd definitely do that in sound forge. I haven't got enough time on audition yet to know if or how well that program handles sample rate conversions. If audition can do it well, that would be your better bet as it can open all of the video formats natively. You can do this in resolve too by delivering audio only.

The reason you get away with it in premiere (in my opinion) is because the waveforms aren't all that accurate in the first place. Despite premiere working better for multicam (for the GPU's I had at the time), I had to use resolve to sync my two cameras. Fortunately the one was substantially longer, so I just had to trim it and render. Then finish the multi work in premiere.

However you get there, if you want your waveforms to be accurate through your entire timeline, you need to get the audio all to the same bit depth and sample rate.

Thanks wireless112, the different audio bit depths was a good suggestion and got me thinking. To test this I created a new project and imported only the problematic MXF files (24 bit audio), but again no audio waveforms were created. I ended up walking away from the computer and when I came back there were audio waveforms!

So, I went back to my original project that contained ProRes and MP4, and imported the long MXF file again and brought it into the timeline. The behavior was the same where no waveform appeared for the MXF file and all working waveforms disappeared (in Media and Edit pages). But this time I left it a while and finally it did create the waveform for the MXF file and all other waveforms came back. I repeated this with several other long (2 hour) MXF files, with the same result.

So, there is a bug, but it's not as bad as I thought. When you import long MXF files it takes a while to build the audio waveform - during the time that this is happening all other audio waveforms disappear (in Media and Edit pages). But once the MFX file audio waveforms are built then everything is okay.

Premiere also takes time to build audio waveforms, but in Premiere there is a progress bar showing you this, and of course all of the other audio waveforms do not disappear during this process.

Hope this helps anyone else using long MXF files in Resolve 15 - just be patient and all the waveforms should re-appear and work as expected.

I'm (very) often into multicams and I remember this behavior too, very frustrating until I found a solution. Fortunately, the solution basically was not to change the WF I've been using until then, that is ... choosing a unique codec and turn all my files (means : all those which were not yet) into it before starting anything up.
This was strictly imposed by my FCP7 years ago which couldn't make multicam files if different codecs were involved, so it's not a huge pain to stick to that WF, even if I know this restriction normally shouldn't exist anymore.
In my case, it's ProRes 4:2:2; and consequently I know that anyway in case of any issue, it wouldn't be caused by that...

I was also very tempted to go back to fcp7 sometimes but forced myself to find a workaround to any issue I might have encountered when making multicam projects inside Resolve. Now it's been ok for almost 2 years in this field (but I admit that as many mac users, I use the fantastic 2-3 clicks Plural Eyes to sync).