17.2 Render Times and Playback Issues on Mac

Since upgrading to 17.2, Resolve has become almost completely unusable due to dropped frames during playback and now that I’m trying to export from it I’m getting on average 20 frames per second vs 150+ in previous versions. My wife has reported similar observations on her iMac since upgrading to the latest version of resolve, too. Is there anything I can try that might fix this, or has something changed with 17.2 that negatively impacts playback and rendering on Intel Macs?

I’ve tried original, proxy media and optimised media, but both are unplayable reliably until the timeline completes its render caching.

Media in this project is smartphone footage hosted on an SSD in a BlackMagic Multidock 10G

It's gonna be rough on a laptop. Smartphone material is generally H.264 or H.265, which is bad for post.

My advice would be to transcode all that material with the same file names in a simpler format like ProRes422, and then deal with that for final color and rendering. Guaranteed, that should be just fine on a 2018 MacBook Pro.

It's gonna be rough on a laptop. Smartphone material is generally H.264 or H.265, which is bad for post.

My advice would be to transcode all that material with the same file names in a simpler format like ProRes422, and then deal with that for final color and rendering. Guaranteed, that should be just fine on a 2018 MacBook Pro.

I know that media types make a difference, but the odd thing is that in all previous resolve versions this has not been an issue. This particular project was very basic, often just one file playing with no colour correction or effects applied and it couldn’t even do that reliably.

Optimising the media appeared to have no-to-minimal impact on playback.