Simple footage, no effects/grades stuttering in the timeline

Never, ever in my life have I ever had as many problems with a piece of software, as I have with Davinci Resolve. Never. Even with the much hated Adobe suite.

Timeline with 3 simple clips stutters so much that it is unusable.

Three simple clips, drone footage - h.265 .MOV, transcoded via Resolve into DNxHR HQ 10bit. Nothing was done to the clips except simple retiming to the middle one.

Machine is a Windows Intel i9 PC, 32GB ram, footage and the whole project is on internal SSDs (Samsung Pro 860 and Evo 970 m.2 nvme), GPU is AMD Radeon Vega 64. The damned thing should fly with such simple tasks

Any ideas before I reformat my PC? Here is a 15sec screen recording of the problem https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BayEbNePcaAxXHRUGjS9n0EFGI0i3DvA/view?usp=sharing

UPDATE for those interested. Here is what I tried since yesterday:

• moved all the footage from internal SSD to external T5 1TB, filled it to about 50%
• deleted the project, started a new one, re-imported everything
• created proxies for the drone h.265 D-log footage (I chose DNxHR SQ)
• turned on smart cache rendering
• dropped proxy resolution to quarter
• created a 1080p timeline with identical FPS as the footage shot

RESULT: single 10 sec clip + music track is not able to play without frame-seek stuttering.

I even tried recreating the project in Premiere Pro. It crashed with a low-level exception (something regarding "Invalid address..."). Now even VLC crashes when I try to play the drone clip directly.

Completely lost here. This has to be a hardware/drivers issue, I refuse to believe that one of the industry standard applications can perform so poorely.

Smart caching may not be that smart everytime. If the stutter happens in timeramped clips then try forcing those clips to cache manually.

I see you have a amd card under windows. Make sure you’re not trying to utilise cuda in the preferences (if that’s even possible).

Also, motion effects can hit performance very hard depending on the type of rendering chosen, for example ‘nearest’ will play like a breeze but ‘speedramp’ will pause even the most powerfull machine. You’ll find those options in either project settings or the inspector of the clip.

I have no experience using amd cards under windows, just nvidia. I know you can utilise Metal under Mac OSX with AMD, but Im not sure how systems perform with AMD and Win combo.

UPDATE and a humble ask for someone from the BlackMagic team to help out.

I hired a friend who is a sysadmin, to see if he can solve this puzzle and here is what we found:

• opening one of the drone clips h.265 .mov 29.98fps directly in VLC player -> crashed the app
• changing the Output in VLC Preferences from "Automatic" to "Direct3D9" -> the clip played beautifully
• still in VLC Preferences, we then tried Direct3D11 -> the app crashed immediately

Obviously, choice of system engine/encoder (please forgive my lack of proper terminology) DirectX or whichever, plays a role here. In Resolve it is not possible to choose, except for the GPU Processing mode. Since, unfortunately, I am on AMD (Asus Rog Strix Vega64), I am stuck with auto or Open CL, no CUDA.

The Resolve weirdness:

I realised that editing with h.265 is a bad practice and a no go so I created a DNxHR SQ proxy, lowered the playback resolution to 1/4 -> stuttering and bad frame-seek issues.

I then fully transcoded the clip to DNxHR 444 12bit, imported into project, tried this huge quality clip in both native 29.98 AND projects native 24fps timelines -> both played beautifully, with minimal stuttering. Even 4K played nice.

Is it possible that Resolve is changing these Direct3D's behind the scenes, depending on the output quality, codec or something?

Please please help, I cannot be transcoding everything to 444 codecs as storage is already an issue.

Many thanks!

Could you try manually caching the timeramped clips on the timeline?

unfortunately, I am on AMD

My choice would be to solve that. But...it's difficult right now to find RTX cards in stock.

storage is already an issue.

I would solve that as well.

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100167523 ... 00&Order=4