Glitchy, strange behaivor - 15.1.2

Having some trouble with Resolve 15. This has been happening on Studio 15.1.1 and 15.1.2.

I have a new project (just started in a few days ago) which has a few bins of imported media, and a feature timeline (and a few backup copies of the same sequence).

Running into some real glitchy behavior. Sometimes Resolve will just crash. Looking at media, saving a still, or importing media. Just dumps to the desktop.

We have about 150-200 clips in the media pool. Most of the media in the project is RED R3D media (around 6K files).

Also noticing weird behavior with our media. Sometimes the clip will say it's offline.. but we know the media is still there on our server (Avid NEXIS). If we restart Resolve, the clip will then usually say it's online again (for a bit).

Also have found in the Media room.. that sometimes when we navigate into a folder.. it will show up as empty. Even though we know there are perfectly good media files in there. If we hit 'Refresh' that will often then make the folder or even the drive show up as empty.

Once we get to this point, often clips will disappear from the 'clips' area (the strip above the timeline) in the Color room.

One other weird thing. Often once we start to see these glitches... we also notice that up in the menu bar, if we click on 'DaVinci Resolve' or 'File', all the symbols (Command, Shift, Option, etc) have turned into Question marks. Weird!

Bit frustrating... is this a bug? Or are there any tips to help keep these behaviors from happening?

System is a Mac Pro 5,1.. running macOS 10.13.6
Dual 2.66 6 Core CPUs
96GB of ram
SSD boot drive
GeForce 1080Ti Grfx Card
Cuda Version 410.130
Blackmagic Video driver 10.9.3

Thanks much.
Peter

How’s your cooling in that MacPro5,1? Are you blasting the fan aimed at the PCIe slots? I’ve actually melted a DeckLink and a NIC when that fan died in my MacPro5,1. Lots of weird problems came from that.

Also, how are you powering the 1080 Ti? If I recall correctly, the Logic Board isn’t actually rated to supply as much power as the 1080 Ti might try to draw, so there could be some weirdness with the network card going to the shared storage.


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[Dwaine Maggart]

Macs have limited system open file handles by default. Red files require lots of file handles. If you have lots of Red files in the Media Pool and run out of open file handles, the files will start going offline.

The solution is to increase system open file handles. The process below explains how. Try it and see if it helps.

Unzip the attached file and place the limit.maxfiles.plist file into the /Library/LaunchDaemons folder on your system drive. That is easily done using Finder.

Then you need to open Terminal and type the following:

sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist<RETURN> (press the Return key...)

It will ask for a password. Password should be your system admin password.

If successful, it should just return to a prompt. Assuming that happens, restart the Mac.

When the system comes back up, open Terminal again, and type:

ulimit -a<RETURN>

If all was successful, the open files value should be 10000. If it was not successful, the value will be 256.

Assuming it's 10000, this should solve the issue of Red files going offline.

Thanks much guys for the reply.

Seth: We do have an external power supply to help feed the 1080 Ti card. I agree with you.. that the Mac Pro likely can't supply enough power for that card. I also don't think it's a cooling issue. We are not really stressing the system (just scrubbing through the raw footage and doing some conform work). Also all the fans are working on the system.

Dwaine: Thanks so much! That is a very helpful tip. I made that adjustment and opened it up to 10,000 open file handles. Resolve is running much better now. More smooth.. and clips don't seem to be going offline any more. Before we even had issues with the project not being able to save (giving an error message about being unable to save the project). Not it seems to be running much better.. Very helpful. Might be nice if that tip was in the Release notes. Or in a Mac config setup/tips doc on the setup page. We will make sure to apply that fix on all our Mac Pro systems.

One other somewhat unrelated question. On some of the RED clips in this project.. the TC is just not matching what the offline guys are seeing in Premiere. We copied the entire R3D clip (all the files inside the particular RDC folder). For some reason in Resolve.. the TC of a particular point in a clip just isn't the same as it is in Premiere. Both seem to say the clip is running at 23.976fps. Also in Premiere the raw RED clip starts earlier.. and in resolve it seems to start like 6 mins later (this is a pretty long interview RED clip). So weird that the clip doesn't start at the same point.. and the matching point in the clip doesn't have matching TC. Guess we have to manually conform any clips from this source?

Thanks much,
Peter

[Dwaine Maggart]

Red has 3 potential timecode sources, selectable in Raw camera Settings - Red.

If you are not using the same timecode selection as the Premiere side, that might account for the difference.