DRS 18.6 Choppy timeline on M1 max

After updating to version 18.6 of DaVinci Resolve Studio on my Mac Studio M1 Max with a 32-core GPU (Sonoma), the timeline has suddenly become very choppy, making it nearly impossible to work. The timeline contains both h.265 and ProRes files, and the issue is occurring with both formats. When I reverted back to version 18.5 on the same timeline, I didn't encounter any problems at all. Has anyone else experienced the same issue?

I found with R18.6, issues (on 2017 iMac and m1 studio ultra) went away when I did a full and complete uninstall of Resolve (after delicensing). I then systematically went through all of the application support library folders, and user prefs folder to manually delete the Resolve components the official uninstaller failed to remove.

Something from previous installs was not playing nice with R18.6.

Then re-install from scratch.
Media plays back smooth, the project library databases began behaving correctly. And cache worked again.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Thanks, John. While it didn't happen to me, it is very useful to know.
I think that many MacOS users don't care to uninstall first (like me).

I'm getting the same issue with the same system. I'm going to revert back to 18.5.1 for now as it's unworkable.

What about trying John's method? 18.6 works here.

I found with R18.6, issues went away when I did a full and complete uninstall of Resolve (after delicensing). I then systematically went through all of the application support library folders, and user prefs folder to manually delete the Resolve components the official uninstaller failed to remove.

Something from previous installs was not playing nice with R18.6.

Then re-install from scratch.
Media plays back smooth, the project library databases began behaving correctly. And cache worked again.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yes, I can confirm it, and even by using the free application 'App Cleaner,' you can avoid manually deleting many files. Once the old installation is completely removed, and version 18.6 is reinstalled, everything works as it should. Thanks for the tip!

Now I can confirm it too. Had a full crash with 18.6 and killing DR with App Cleaner and re-installing cured it.
While I made a backup, for sure, my library was still intact.

18.6 is not really stable, it seems. If this happens again, I'll go back.

Choppy playback returned. Even after removing all installed Resolve 18.6 files.
For a brief moment all was good.
So I also re-generated all of my proxies from the HEVC originals - both ProRes 422 HQ 4K, and ProRes 1080p.
NOTE: Used the Resolve Timeline method for generating ProRes full quality and proxy files. (Not the external Proxy Generator!)
And relinked.

And at last no more funky incomplete caching. Indeed no caching at all. Even running the timeline direct from the 4K ProRes “originals”.

A key element of this was rebuilding the project from the ground up. Exporting and reimporting the original timeline.
Note: And forcing 25p. For some reason Resolve 18.6 kept altering my revised Default project setting from 25p to 24P. So everyday I duplicate the project. I double check to make sure it hasn’t somehow reverted to 24p. While the timelines remained at 25p, but the project wrapper was randomly reverting to 24p.

So 24p secondary timelines were getting created inside an active project with (with a supposed and set 25P frame rate). This meant massive caching was being triggered when 24p sub timelines were unwittingly inserted into 25p primary timelines.
(sorry about my wordy description).

Resolve 18.5.1 had no obvious issues with 24p issue. updating project default in project settings, and updating Resolve preferences default seems to stick. But new Project library defaults to 24P and requires updating every time.(hassel).
So I have now gone back to R18.5.1. Because deadlines loom. (2 days later Resolve 18.5.1 still behaving well)

I did try reinstalling and that did not work for me. I had to revert to 18.5 to have a usable system

Damn it man ... BMD went full Adobe with the 18.6 release.

Timeline performance is bad
Playback performance is terrible
Audio is totally messed up, sometimes missing half the audio in a clip

Meanwhile 18.5.1 works fine but even this has some issues that i have noticed, when selecting hours of clips in the timeline, the interface stutters, didn't happen in older versions.

I suspected that AMD/Radeon users were affected but it looks like Apple and some Nvidia users are affected as well by this release, and i think that i have seen only 1 reply from BMD official saying that they are looking into it.

indeed BMD's silence on this severe issue is extremely disappointing.

Mistakes happen. Just don't stick your head in the sand about them. We use BMD's products for work. Treat us as adults and tell us what the problem is and what to do.

They should have done a public beta.

they should pull 18.6 from download and communicate with their users.

We shouldn't speculate as to the motivation, but a revenue stream for cloud storage is tied to the release of 18.6 so I'm guessing that is why it hasn't been pulled - and apparently not all users are affected by these bugs.

I really wish Peter would chime in and acknowledge these bugs, though. Seems wrong somehow.

completely wrong. As a minimum we should be given an ETA for a fix.

completely wrong. As a minimum we should be given an ETA for a fix.

Don't hold your breath. BMD never reveals timelines for anything. I don't understand why BMD hasn't acknowledged this issue. Maybe the Resolve installation is changing to a Rosetta 2 compatibility mode on Apple Silicon or something along those lines - very odd. Maybe there isn't a general issue with Resolve, but I doubt it - too many users both on macOS and Windows are seeing a variety of performance problems.

Steve, this is not a minor glitch which requires an extra restart once a day or an extra click to perform a specific task.

This is Resolve being unusable for many users. It's terribly disappointing to see BMD behaving like this. Mistakes happen. It's how you deal with them which is important.

After my experiences with Vegas when it changed hands... I have to wonder whether Magix has purchased Resolve from BMD

Steve, this is not a minor glitch which requires an extra restart once a day or an extra click to perform a specific task.

This is Resolve being unusable for many users. It's terribly disappointing to see BMD behaving like this. Mistakes happen. It's how you deal with them which is important.

I'm not sure if we are in violent agreement or not. Seems like a huge bug that should be squashed ASAP. However, this forum is a great source of confirmation bias. For all we know, a small percentage of users are actually experiencing issues with Resolve 18.6 - how could we know (as a percentage)?

There are quite a few long time Resolve users who have either not yet upgraded or have not really commented on whether they are seeing these same bugs reported by many users here. I'm interested as to why some users are not seeing these performance bugs and crashes. Could be as simple as size of project and number of clips (as Mads posted, less than 200 clips on the timeline and you don't notice the huge performance hit of ripple delete). I was hoping that commonalities could be established such as hardware (e.g., Apple Silicon sluggish performance, etc.).

There are certainly enough reports that BMD should be looking into this and trying to reproduce the issues and receiving a statement from BMD to that effect. We'll see.