Editing a large project in Resolve - very slow

We've made the switch from Premiere to Resolve and love it so far.

Unfortunately, one area in which we are having problems is performance while editing a large project. By large, I mean a 2 hour feature film with 32TB of 6k BRAW footage. We've broken the film down into scenes and have edited each scene there.... with reasonable performance in Resolve 18.1.2. But when we try to assemble the whole film in one timeline, Resolve becomes unusable.... moving sections around incurs about a 0.3/fps and it becomes very hard to do anything really.

We're running a fast i7 with 32gb of ram. The media is on a large internal raid 0 drive. Our graphics card is a NVidia 3060ti. We've set the project previews to 'smart' and the lowest quality: quarter.

Do we need to use proxies or can we get Resolve to perform better with a large timeline with 6k BRAW media clips?

The only suggestion I can think of is render the project out in sections, like in reels: build timelines no more than 20 minutes long (plus or minus a few minutes), like a traditional film delivery. Render those out in a "visually-lossless" format like DNxHR 444 at the delivery resolution, then build the entire feature with the finished soundtrack as a single timeline.

If the feature is locked, you might want to try removing all extraneous material from the bins, and see if that helps make the session respond faster. We see occasional slowdowns with 256GB of RAM, but in general it's not that much of a problem. My opinion is in general, more hardware is better for Resolve performance.

What resolution is your working timeline? If you have not already done so, try setting it to HD.
Also note that your signature suggests you are running Resolve 10 on a Windows 8.1 based system... but your post says Resolve 18.1.2?

Things you should do when editing long form in Resolve:

- Don't do one project for the whole movie. Create one Project Library for a given movie. In that project Library you create one project per sequence, or group of sequences, or maybe acts. Any subdivision that works. So, when you look at your Project Library, you see all your projects properly labeled.

- Use Dynamic Project Switching to quickly move from project to project and copy and paste elements.

- Create proxies. This is mandatory in any long form project.

- Use the Disable Timeline Feature to disable timelines you don't need, like alternative versions of an edit.

- And like Mark says, don't have Timelines longer than 20 minutes. Work in reels, export, then put all sections in a final and new project.

- Also, make your project HD or DCI 2K maximum.

There are more things that help, but start with that.

Really interested in this thread. I've just moved over from Avid to do long form broadcast programmes after having done a few shorter projects in Resolve.

I'm currently doing a two part 90 min feature with a few hundred hours of rushes on about 12TB of local storage (USB3). I've used the proxy generator to create h264 8 bit proxies and work in HD timelines using the proxies.

Generally performance has been very good even though the project now has over 350 timelines. (Many of these are assemblies of rushes clips).
However, now I am nearing Fine Cut I am finding the machine crashing more and more often. Mostly this happens when scrolling quickly through a rushes timeline. The app just freezes. What I have noticed is that in Task Manager the Resolve app has been suspended. (this is on Windows 10).

I normally have to End Task snd restart the app. The saving grace is Resolves Live Save option which means that I haven't lost an edit yet! Also the Project Backup has been useful a few times.

The timeline editing is slower with a long timeline but not hugely. One thing I have noticed with 18.2 is that any Voice Isolation or Dialogue leveler effects in the timeline seem to cause slow downs in longer timelines.

Looking at the options outlined above:
How do you disable a timeline?

Nick

Very interesting thread (have a feature edit coming up).

One thing I have noticed with 18.2 is that any Voice Isolation or Dialogue leveler effects in the timeline seem to cause slow downs in longer timelines

I noticed audio/Fairlight as being a main cause for slowing down too.

[Rohit Gupta]

We've made the switch from Premiere to Resolve and love it so far.

Unfortunately, one area in which we are having problems is performance while editing a large project. By large, I mean a 2 hour feature film with 32TB of 6k BRAW footage. We've broken the film down into scenes and have edited each scene there.... with reasonable performance in Resolve 18.1.2. But when we try to assemble the whole film in one timeline, Resolve becomes unusable.... moving sections around incurs about a 0.3/fps and it becomes very hard to do anything really.

We're running a fast i7 with 32gb of ram. The media is on a large internal raid 0 drive. Our graphics card is a NVidia 3060ti. We've set the project previews to 'smart' and the lowest quality: quarter.

Do we need to use proxies or can we get Resolve to perform better with a large timeline with 6k BRAW media clips?

Are you able to PM me a drp export of your project? Also, please grab a log from the help menu. If you can also screen record a small video which shows the problem, that might be helpful too.

I would not expect copying clips from the individual scene timelines to a Master timeline to have any effect on the performance of those timelines. The work needed to render a particular frame doesn't depend on how how many clips are in the timeline, or on which timeline they're in (assuming parity across timelines).

Can't be 100% sure but one situation that seems to create crash situations is editing from a timeline that contains compound clips to another timeline without Decompose being on. So you would end up with compound clips within compound clips on a timeline.

I do this often because I normally create a selects timeline of my rushes and then edit that into my main timeline with Decompose Compound Clips off so that a Match frame goes back to the Selects reel rather than the individual clip. Very useful and something that Avid doesn't do.

However when it comes to compiling a programme or editing a bit of my Main programme into another (for teases etc.) I often get a crash situation.

Workaround is to leave Decompose Compound Clips on Edit On.

I would not expect copying clips from the individual scene timelines to a Master timeline to have any effect on the performance of those timelines. The work needed to render a particular frame doesn't depend on how how many clips are in the timeline, or on which timeline they're in (assuming parity across timelines).

While that's true in concept, it's a common thing for NLEs to slow down when the timeline gets long. One has to be mindful of this when designing and careful when coding to avoid this happening.

There are many reasons this can happen but I don't think listing some will really help anyone here.

Nick Elborough:

for the longer and complex Timelines, disable waveforms, and use Time Line View options without thumbnails.

That helps.

Also, for editorial, you may bypass Grades and Fusion Compositions.

A forgot to mention before that you may also use Render in Place in clips with complex grades and fusion compositions.

I am curious: did you do all that in a single project?

Like I said, everytime I see hughe projects it's one project library, and multiple projects.

To disable Timelines, just right click on them and hit it Disable.

Disabled Timelines don't load in the memory when opening the project.

Nick Elborough:
I am curious: did you do all that in a single project?

Like I said, everytime I see hughe projects it's one project library, and multiple projects.

Thanks for the tips.
Yes 1 project. I'm used to working in Avid where the project is split into Bins and folders that are saved separately. However the project DB in this case is only 250Mb. So not huge at all. I think the 120Gb of RAM on my machine helps.
I suspect most of my crashes are where media gets hung up being sent from USB drives. Even when using proxies.

It is a shame that the proxy generator on PC can't do DNxLB files which would be easier on the system than mp4's.

32g sys ram might be a bit low
i often see Resolve using 70+ g
96 seems to be a minimum, 128 more comfortable
i usualy work on features, typicaly is 64- 80Tb of raw, 95 min timeline
only finishing and gradeing, not cutting

How do you disable a timeline?

You right-click on the Timeline name in the list on the Edit page, and then choose Disable Timeline:



There's a lot of spots like this in the manual where I wish there were illustrations to show what the text is talking about.

It is a shame that the proxy generator on PC can't do DNxLB files which would be easier on the system than mp4's.

To me, H.64 (MP4) is a bad choice as a proxy format because it can't store embedded timecode. I think you'd be better off creating all the proxies from within Resolve and just exporting DNxHR LB files and manually relinking. Once you're done editing, manually force a relink back to the camera original files.

Second that.
I don't get why the Proxy Generator is offering ProRes on the Mac but no DNxHD/HR on PCs.

Hello, hello!

How is your DaVinci performance going now?

Did it get better?