New User, First Experience (hope this is a bug)

Hello everybody! I am a totally new user to Resolve, I only discovered it last week and must say how blown away I am by it. How did I not know about this amazing software before??! I already told my team (currently all using Final Cut and Motion) "you must all try Resolve!" lol.

Anyway, after watching some tutorials and playing around, all was good ... until yesterday when I tried using it for first 'real' job. Oh dear. Now I'm really worried. And HOPE it's just a beta bug that can be fixed. Else I simply won't be able to use resolve anymore.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that the playback is like 2 frames a second and the project is as basic as I can imagine. No video, just a very simply fusion animation (two text layers, one moving left, one moving right, and a black background). When I try to play this on the main timeline it is so slow it's impossible to work with. Even when the render bar is blue, it's still super slow.

I have tried every optimisation option I can find on Youtube. tried every setting including timeline resolution of quarter/8th/ 16th. Dropping down to 760 resolution. Trying different proxy formats. Ensuring all the cache & render options are optimised. Nothing helps

Here is a video (captured on my phone, sorry) showing my experience: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-dOxaq ... sp=sharing

And here is an image showing the fusion nodes just to confirm that it's a very simple one:

Screenshot 2020-12-17 at 16.30.42.png (64.16 KiB) Viewed 530 times

My computer specs are:
2020 imac
3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
40 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB
512 SSD with plenty of room left

Other observations:
- it plays fine in Fusion page (after it's rendered with the green bar).
- in fusion page, before it's rendered it plays back at only 3fps (is drawing text REALLY that complex?)
- changing proxy playback while it's playing, crashes software 100% of the time (BUG REPORT)
- rendering usually ends up with a mix of red and blue. Why doesn't it ever all go blue? seems to skip parts.

Really hope someone can help, or that the issue can be fixed. Was falling in love with this software until this.

Best regards
Dale

I'm new to Resolve too, so have many of the same questions, but will try to answer those that I can.

I definitely don't see the performance issues that you are, though Fusion is slow initially it does cache things for me, and from then on it's pretty smooth. This goes for both the Fusion and Edit tabs. I wouldn't call it buttery smooth, but definitely not unusably slow either.

One guess I have is that Fusion comps should always start with either a Media In node (i.e. a clip from the Edit timeline), or a Background or similar node. This sets the resolution of the fusion comp, and things get WEIRD without it. I wouldn't be surprised if Fusion is a sobbing mess under the hood without one of these things as the first node in your comp.

Also make sure you lower the caching timeout for Fusion comps in the Options (can't remember if it's project options of Resolve options) from the default 5s. This seems to be general advice I've seen in quite a few Fusion tutorials, and I have it set at the minimum of 1s.

- it plays fine in Fusion page (after it's rendered with the green bar).
- in fusion page, before it's rendered it plays back at only 3fps (is drawing text REALLY that complex?)

Totally normal. That's why it caches, and why Resolve has caches at multiple levels.

- rendering usually ends up with a mix of red and blue. Why doesn't it ever all go blue? seems to skip parts.

I don't know all the ins and outs of caching at multiple levels (Fusion, Edit, etc) and I assume when talking about red/blue you're talking in Edit. In general, you'll notice that things that get played get cached. That's certainly how it works in Fusion. There are other preferences that let you control whether other kinds of caching are always on, always off, or "smart".

There's also a preference that determines how long Resolve waits after you stop doing things in Edit before rendering/caching kicks in. The default is 5 seconds, so if you keep editing and playing and doing stuff in Edit you'll postpone rendering/caching of Fusion stuff until you stop and just wait. So the red stays red.

If you modify stuff that's blue, it may require re-rendering and turn red. So you have to manage your workflow and caching preferences a bit. You can also do things in v17 like Render In Place to force something to render and not to re-render at all.

I just tried this with the node structure you show, and without a Background node I don't see anything rendered at all - not sure how you have it working (albeit slowly)?

I've attached an archive of my test project to this post, could you try it out and see what it perfoms like for you? It contains two Fusion comps in the timeline; the first comp is animated text WITH an initial Background node, the second comp (which doesn't work for me) is the same animated text WITHOUT a Background node. FYI even in both Fusion and Edit I see no performance impact at all to playing this back, not even any attempts at caching it that I can tell - it just plays smoothly.

To import the file, unzip it somewhere then in Resolve's Project Manager window right-click in an empty space and select "Restore Project Archive" (not Import Project!).

Animated Word Test-01.dra.zip

(36.49 KiB) Downloaded 48 times

Thank you for the test file richards. I found 2 bugs just opening that . The first was that it crashed first time I right clicked on "restore project archive". the second is that it wouldn't let me select your file. I ended up opening it by dragging the file onto that space instead. Anyway! back to the question in hand...

So the first half of your project played fine, nice and fast. The second was just black.

I then tried replacing your text with similar text to my own. And it was fine! So I think you could well be on to something. Thank so much if this solves it!

I will now attempt to fix my project with background node and I will report back with the result.

Warmest regards

Hey again, ok so i added a background note to that particular project and the whole thing just went crazy & chaotic. So I decided to delete it all and rebuild from scratch, this time ensuring I used a background node.

First impressions are that it seem to work!!! The design was slightly different this time with less text but I'm confident you have nailed it! Tomorrow I will test some more just to be sure, but massive thank you for your observation and suggestion!

I found more bugs while making this. For example, showing the keyframe curve for Transform-Y and then clicking on a keyframe point and trying to change it to bezier curve or ease-in resulted in the whole thing switching to "transform-X" quite bizarre. I'm not sure on the bug report protocol so I will look into it and then submit some proper reports.

Anyway thanks again.