Timeline Zooming very slow!

Hi there

I though the 15.2 update was supposed to speed up the timeline? On my windows machine zooming in and out of the timeline is painfully slow and laggy.

Anybody else experiencing this? Why?

Cheers

It's always been like that, I hope they'll improve it. There's a lot they can improve in terms of performance when zooming and scrolling on the Edit page. Compared to Premiere Pro and FCPX Davinci Resolve is really behind in that regard.

I have a feeling they have initially prioritized keyboard editors. Us mouse pushers have been second class.

It has never been so bad which is ironic, since the promoted that explicitly to be better in 15.2 - i had no issues with zooming in 14

I've no problems with this in Studio 15.2.1 on Windows 10 Pro (1803). I find the new Timeline Animations very smooth and helpful. I find the Zoom actions very responsive.

The response "feel" has changed a little bit, but in general Zoom in / zoom out on the Edit page has been OK for me on Mac OS 10.12.6 on a 12-core Trashcan Mac.

The experience with zoom on the Edit page depends on how you use it. Zooming using the keyboard or the zoom control above the timeline is fine. But zooming using the mouse wheel, a trackpad or anything else where you can perform a "stepless" zoom is not so great. Both macOS and Windows.

I see these issues:

1. Jittery audio waveforms
   The audio waveforms continues redrawing while zooming, which would be fine if it was fast and accurate but it's not. During the zoom animation, the horizontal scale of the waveform is inconsistent and jittery making for a bad experience. The scale grows and shrinks instead of just growing or shrinking during the animation. Sometimes it also shifts the waveform left/right. Often the point of zooming in is to use the audio waveform as a guide for a cut and this behavior always annoys me.
   
   
2. Zoom speed cap
   The worst part is that there's a speed cap on how quickly you can perform a zoom (remember, this is for stepless zooming, not when using the keyboard or the zoom control in the user interface). I suppose the speed cap is there to prevent flickering, but it means you can't "flick" the zoom to quickly get to a level you want to be at, instead you have to watch the animation as it zooms at a low, fixed speed.
   
   Premiere Pro suspends waveform redrawing while the zoom animation is taking place and only draws the waveform once you've landed on a zoom level. This allows for a much smoother experience and it isn't noticeably speed capped, you can zoom in/out very quickly.
   
   
3. No native support for trackpad pinch to zoom
   When using a trackpad you can only zoom by simulating a mouse scroll wheel using Alt+Scroll. Premiere Pro and FCPX allows proper pinch to zoom.
   
   
4. Trackpad scrolling speed cap
   Same as when zooming, if you use a trackpad to scroll the timeline left/right there's a very low speed cap forcing you to watch the timeline animate slowly instead of just getting there quickly by flicking like in Premiere Pro. Even worse, because Resolve is animating the scroll at a fixed top speed, it won't stop scrolling when you do, it will continue animating the move to "finish" it (not as good as proper inertia scrolling since the top speed is fixed). This completely breaks the feeling of being able to control the timeline.
   
   
5. Zoom pivot point
   Resolve always uses the playhead as the pivot point for a zoom. I would like to have the option of switching the pivot point to the mouse cursor like in Premiere Pro.

I still prefer Resolve to Premiere for other reasons, but the issues above are currently handled much better in Premiere. And like I said, none of these are really an issue if you're primarily a keyboard editor. But that doesn't mean non-keyboard editors should be fine with a worse experience in Resolve than in other NLE:s.

Here's an example of the jittery audio waveforms when zooming.

First, it's working OK. I'm zoomed out enough to see the whole timeline.

zoom1.gif (254.14 KiB) Viewed 3297 times

When I zoom in further, all hell breaks loose when I'm zoomed in enough for the pivot point to be centered on the timeline. Look at the start/end of the video clip AA7999, the zoom animates pretty well (but slow compared to how I would like it). But the audio waveform below jumps around completely out of control until it settles in the correct position. This gif isn't full framerate, it looks much worse live. To give you an idea of the zoom level where this is happening, the AA7999 clip in the middle is 37 frames long in a 25fps timeline. The audio clip spans the length of the timeline and is a 48KHz wav file, if that matters.

zoom2.gif (230.92 KiB) Viewed 3297 times

Here's Premiere Pro doing the same thing. Audio waveforms aren't jumping around and I can zoom as fast or slow as I want. The tradeoff is that waveforms aren't being drawn as it animates (only the containers), but since it's so fast it doesn't matter.

zoom3.gif (40.12 KiB) Viewed 3291 times

Has anyone else experienced these issues, especially this one?



It's been like that since v14, Windows and macOS, many different GPU:s/configurations.

Mine seems to be working fine. I don't experience what you are seeing.

Even if you zoom in to the maximum zoom level?

I'll try to put together a downloadable project that shows the issue.

Has anyone else experienced these issues, especially this one?

I see that if I use the scroll wheel.

I just never use the scroll wheel.

Ok, thank you for confirming.

While the UI performance optimizations in v15.2.3 released today are nice, all the issues are still there on the Edit page. It's just smoother. Now we can watch the audio waveform jump around horizontally in 60 Hz when zooming. At least on macOS, on Windows with a GeForce Titan X the audio waveforms are painfully slow.

It so puzzling because zooming/panning on the Color page timeline with for example a Magic Trackpad is really nice, someone obviously took their time in making that user friendly not just for keyboards. On the Edit page timeline it's quite bad.

Scrolling the Edit page timeline with a trackpad/scroll wheel is normally such a timesaver but here the slow animation makes it unproductive and you might as well drag the scroll bar instead. Speaking of which, the scrollbar doesn't have a speed cap.

On the Fairlight page, scrolling left/right with a trackpad works very well for some zoom levels, but once you zoom closer the trackpad is less and less responsive to the point that you can't scroll at all.

Hope v16 brings some of these productivity fixes!