Blackmagic Forum

I've been a Vegas Pro user for over 20 years and could never imagine leaving it behind.
After experimenting a little with the free version of DR I was blown away enough to buy it.
I did a few projects with a few little niggles which I thought was because I was new to the program and needed to learn more about it.
I watched some amazing tutorials on YT and was excited to try out the animation possibilities in Fusion and colour grading etc.
Anyway, to the point.
I've already posted in another thread about getting black clips and nothing works on the timeline (not even the space bar) and I eventually gave up on a day's work and started again.
It took me a few hours to get to the stage where I was before the crash.
I had 4 clips of 2 and 3 minutes each, 2 angles of each clip using a 5D and a Hero 8.
I have one shot as pic-in-pic in the corner of the main image and no cuts or edits. (on both clips)
I'm using a simple timer (text+ with time code) and a couple of simple Fusion titles. (same title with different text in the 2 different clips.
This should have taken an hour so to put together. It took me half a day. So many crashes, freezes with no indication of what was going wrong.
I eventually managed to get my edit as I wanted it after having to open the multicam in a timeline, selecting everything and copying it to another timeline, because that's the only way it would play properly.
I went to the Deliver page and the "add to render queue" was greyed out. That took another few hours of Googling and trying different things, many restarts and reboots etc.
I had a timeline that was playing as it should (apart from some lag, but I can live with that) but I couldn't render it.
I had to open another timeline, again copy and paste all the clips and then go to the Deliver page. I finally managed to render it.
I have been saving my projects for the past day with "save as" every time, so as not to lose too much work if everything blocks like last time.
Every time I go to the Fusion page I'm nervous that something will block my project.
Is everyone here having an enjoyable, stress-free experience with DR?
So far it's making me pull my hair out.

You must have gathered by now that your experience isn't typical. I can't offer you any specific guidance on Fusion, but one thing does stand out in your signature: 3 GPUs!

Before doing anything else, disable the intel and AMD GPUs in device manager, and see if that makes any difference. Or did somebody already fruitlessly suggest that, in your earlier threads?

John Paines wrote:You must have gathered by now that your experience isn't typical. I can't offer you any specific guidance on Fusion, but one thing does stand out in your signature: 3 GPUs!

Before doing anything else, disable the intel and AMD GPUs in device manager, and see if that makes any difference. Or did somebody already fruitlessly suggest that, in your earlier threads?

He has 2 computers listed in his signature, a Mac with integrated graphics and an AMD gpu, and a PC with a Nvidia card.

As far as stability with Resolve, I've been using it for over 2 years and it has been a great experience for me, rarely do I have any issues.

John Paines wrote:You must have gathered by now that your experience isn't typical. I can't offer you any specific guidance on multicam workflows or Fusion, but one thing does stand out in your signature: 3 GPUs!

Before doing anything else, disable the intel and AMD GPUs in device manager, and see if that makes any difference. Or did somebody already fruitlessly suggest that, in your earlier threads?

Why would you already assume that I have ignored advice? ("fruitlessly suggest")
No, nobody suggested that, and no, I don't have 3 GPUs (at least not in one machine!), I have a Macbook Pro and a PC. (stated in my sig.)

With all respect, the projects I worked on previously (only had DR for about 3 weeks) were much more intensive and I had only minor issues. The major problems came the first time I tried multicam.

I will take a look at my GPU set up in my Mac however, I wasn't aware that I had to disable anything as, as I said, it worked reasonably well at the beginning.

xunile wrote:He has 2 computers listed in his signature, a Mac with integrated graphics and an AMD gpu, and a PC with a Nvidia card.

As far as stability with Resolve, I've been using it for over 2 years and it has been a great experience for me, rarely do I have any issues.

Thanks for the feedback.
I'm happy to receive news that others are having a positive experience and quite ready to accept that I may have to tweak something to make my problems go away.
As I have a similar pc set-up to you, is there anything I need to be aware of there? I've only worked on 1 project so far on the pc and that was only a simple edit which I continued on my Mac.
All my issues so far have been with the Mac, but that is also a powerful laptop which seemed to work very well at first.

i'd look at workflow that is based on transcoding the longGoP sources to a more suitable format before editing

Dermot Shane wrote:i'd look at workflow that is based on transcoding the longGoP sources to a more suitable format before editing

This comes up time and time again with the implication that no NLE is suited to working with longGoP codecs.

Well I used Sony's NLE for many years with H264 footage and never had *any* problems related to the format. I never had to transcode a single bit of source material.

Since switching to Resolve I've also had no problems using H264 and H265 source material.

It might be slightly quicker to use other source formats but (at least for me) all the NLEs I've used have handled longGoP source formats just fine. Even the very high bitrate H265 4K footage being produced by my new Panasonic HC-X1500 is buttery smooth and hardly stresses my mid-range system at all... mind you, I am still using DR15.3 which probably places lower demands on the hardware than 16.x does.

I firmly believe that if someone *is* having problems using longGoP source material then transcoding may help but that there is something more fundamentally wrong with their setup. Let's face it, if I can work with 4K 60FPS footage using an old GT1060/6 video card then more powerful systems should have *zero* issues -- so long as they're using the right drivers and their system is otherwise operating properly.

I don't buy that transcoding is essential to a good NLE experience if your source comes in H264/265 format.

Transcoding is worth a try when you are having problems and suspect the media. GPU's issues are also common culprits.

h.264 and h.265 come in a lot of different flavours, including some really non-standard stuff from cell phones, capture devices, action cams...

Is any of the footage (e.g. Gopro) variable frame rate?

FWIW. Resolve is more reliable than Vegas, although I rarely have problems with either.

Chris Hiles wrote:Why would you already assume that I have ignored advice? ("fruitlessly suggest")
No, nobody suggested that, and no, I don't have 3 GPUs (at least not in one machine!), I have a Macbook Pro and a PC. (stated in my sig.)

"Fruitlessly" in the sense you tried it and it didn't make any difference. Nothing was assumed about your diligence or your character.

The advice to run only one GPU per computer stands, but if your PC already satisfies that condition, and you're seeing these failures, that wouldn't seem to be the issue.

RCModelReviews wrote:This comes up time and time again with the implication that no NLE is suited to working with longGoP codecs.

Well I used Sony's NLE for many years with H264 footage and never had *any* problems related to the format. I never had to transcode a single bit of source material.

Sony's editor does not work in 32float, Resolve does

there's a substaintial diffrence in processing under the hood there, even if you feed 8bit into it, it still works in 32float

from a quick glance, Sony's editor, (and most NLE's that are not targeted to finishing like Flame/Mistika) process in 8 or 10bit

RCModelReviews wrote:This comes up time and time again with the implication that no NLE is suited to working with longGoP codecs. Well I used Sony's NLE for many years with H264 footage and never had *any* problems related to the format. I never had to transcode a single bit of source material. Since switching to Resolve I've also had no problems using H264 and H265 source material.

I think @Dermot Shane is 100% correct. The problems with working with H.264 cameras and codecs are as follows:

1) lack of consistent file naming: generally, whenever you change a camera card, it resets to C0001 again (or a similar filename), which means at the end of the day, you wind up with multiple files with the exact same name.

2) lack of time-of-day timecode: with time-of-day timecode, at any moment you can tell when a specific shot was recorded. In the event of multiple cameras, they'll sync together much easier because all the timecode matches (assuming a common reference). And it also assumes the reference will provide a constant speed over many hours, so there'll be no drift or weird speed changes. I encounter lots of those problems with cheap non-timecoded cameras like GoPros and DSLRs.

3) perhaps most importantly, small camera H.264 codecs are ugly. They're almost always 8-bit, and they stomp on the signal pretty hard, to the extent that you see a lot of visual compression artifacts. The decompression takes a big performance hit out of your system's CPU. I would much rather deal with even a modest camera that shoots 10-bit less-compressed ProRes or MXF or Raw or some other format that avoids the traps and problems of H.264. (There are 10/12/16-bit H.264 like AVC-Intra, and those are generally fine.)

For all these reasons, there are better workflows where you transcode all this material to a common format -- even a simple one like ProRes 422 or DNxHD -- which I know will play back with more consistency and fewer potential problems. And I would also look at renaming the files to avoid trainwrecks when sessions are moved to different systems. Trust me, if you have a timeline with 17 shots from a file named "C0001," only there are literally 17 files to choose from named "C0001," you're going to run into issues.

Just because you've had a closed system with Vegas and never ran into the problem doesn't mean you understand what goes on in the real world. If you dealt with Avid and Premiere and Resolve and Baselight and had to deal with a half-dozen editors all working on the same project, plus VFX people outside of the building, plus a separate sound crew, you would run into it. Getting the workflow right is a critical part of the process, and it's by no means a Resolve-specific problem. In this case, it's a camera problem. Production problems tend to roll downhill, and it can cause massive, expensive, and time-consuming problems.

You're right Marc, I'm only looking at it from the perspective of the work I do which is almost entirely for the likes of YouTube.. which stomps over the footage (with compression artifacts and such) to such an extent that fault in the source material becomes pretty irrelevant.

Unlike those who are creating output for broadcast or such, where the "per minute" value of the footage is orders of magnitude greater than the footage I cut, my edits, grading and such have to be "quick and easy" with due regard for the fact that YouTube will always be the weakest link. I think the most I've ever earned from my footage is around $2,500 for a 15 minute video but the average is probably less than $2 a minute so I cut my cloth accordingly

Perhaps one of the issues that we're seeing now is that wheras DR used to be a tool used almost exclusively by production houses with big budgets, it's now attracting quite a large user-base of people like myself who have "far less exacting standards". Our priorities are significantly different to yours and that's putting extra stress on the design and performance parameters of the software.

That'll teach BMD for making the damned thing so cheap!

Yeah, I think that's the main problem.
DR is attractive for its price, but it still is a professional program at its very core and needs serious hardware and serious planning of one's workflow. If one needs to work with sub-standard cameras, other programs might be the better choice, even if they are not free.

Dermot Shane wrote:Sony's editor does not work in 32float, Resolve does

there's a substaintial diffrence in processing under the hood there, even if you feed 8bit into it, it still works in 32float

from a quick glance, Sony's editor, (and most NLE's that are not targeted to finishing like Flame/Mistika) process in 8 or 10bit

Care to laborate the actual impact of 32bit float processing? Why would it make some format act up if they are all equally converted to working data type?

Since using DR17 I've had no issues and am completely happy with pretty much everything about it. Looks like I jumped the gun a little. Thanks for all the input.