Blackmagic Forum

I've been scouring the forums and other forums about Resolve and this has been a largely ignored issue for years where Resolve will keep scaled at 100% even if you select 125% and then will shoot up to 200% scaling for anything above 150%

It makes using a 4k monitor for resolve fairly bad which is annoying when everything else with 17 has been a great addition

I agree. The UI could stand a fair amount of refinement when considering 4K displays as well as the amount of space things take up. An update that reduces wasted UI space and allocates that space to more useful areas would be a great addition. The ability to fully customize the UI would be a huge addition to Resolve in a future version (e.g. think C4D / Autodesk / Adobe apps where users can adjust the layouts to their exact needs).

Display Scaling should always be set to 100%.

If things are too small, then you need physically larger monitors.

I'm running dual 32" 4k displays. I'm also a Generalist (Photo / Video / CGI) and the issue of UI scaling within an app is only an issue with Resolve.

Here's the issue I'm experiencing with Resolve and using 4K displays...

- Windows UI scaling to 125 - 150% (recommended) is widely used by many people in many different industries and works well in both a practical sense and usability sense.

- A list of apps I use regularly includes: Adobe Creative Suite (PPro/AE/Photoshop/Illustrator), C4D, Zbrush, Substance, Modo, Blender, C1Pro, Kyno, PureRef, Mootools 3D Viewer. None of these apps have issues with UI scaling. Resolve is the only one that behaves poorly / oddly. In my opinion this should be top of the list in terms of Resolve's user experience to-do list.

I don't understand the push-back I'm seeing in the Blackmagic forums when users request a working solution to Resolve's UI scaling when using 4K (i.e. High Resolution) displays and Windows 10 scaling. Again, virtually every mainstream production app that I'm aware of resolved this ages ago.

Follow-up: Let's assume that Windows scaling is being used by many production artists who work on 4K displays (which it likely is). When this is set to 125% and Resolve is set to 'Override high DPI scaling behavior' then Resolve's UI is far too small to read/use effectively. When Windows scaling is set to 150% (recommended) and Resolve is set to 'Override high DPI scaling behavior' then Resolve's UI is far too big to read/use effectively. When Windows (the System) is set to control the behavior of Resolve's UI then visually Resolve's UI scales to an expected scale, however the Clean Feed to a second display does not work (shifts to fill only 75% or 50% of the second display when Windows scaling is set to either 125% or 150%. Basically, Resolve's UI scaling needs some fine-tuning. This would make a big difference.

I agree this needs to be looked at. I don't think it's as simple as inheriting Windows settings, because by default that will scale the video as well as the UI, which isn't what we want. I did find a hack that let me scale to 200%, but this was effectively the same as running my UHD monitor at 1080P. The UI was perfect, but the video was all scaled.

I suspect the reason this is not being looked at is because the Resolve team seems very stubborn about updating the software frameworks that they rely on. Resolve is built in QT, which has had the capability of doing fractional scaling (needed for non-integer scaling factors like 125% or 150%) for a quite a while now as far as I know, but the version Resolve is using does not feature it. Likewise, the project database uses Postgres 9.5 which is just about to pass out of support. The current version of Postgres is 12, and 13 will be released soon... Likewise, they are still including Python 2.7 for scripting, which is over a decade old and has been deprecated for a while now.

My guess is that the team's rationale for doing this is stability (don't change what isn't broken), but it doesn't seem in keeping with common coding practice to me. From where I sit, not updating to more recent versions looks like accumulating technical debt that will make the software harder to update when the old frameworks it uses are no longer supported. It also makes Resolve less secure, and it holds back features like UI scaling that have already been solved and could be implemented with barely any work on DaVinci's part if they simply updated the underlying software frameworks they are using. The longer they leave this, the more work they are making for themselves when they are finally forced to update...

There have been many, many, many posts about this, going back years now. Blackmagic is definitely aware of it. They haven't responded to a single one of these posts (as far as I am aware). One can only hope that they are indeed working on it and a fix will come sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, the only good "solution" is to use a Mac. Over there, you'll get a Resolve interface that doesn't scale like a clown, and you'll also get a high resolution display, unlike the aliased mess that you'll get with a physically larger UHD monitor being viewed up-close.

Being on Windows myself, this is not a solution at all, so the wishful thinker in me hopes Blackmagic drops a 17.5 update that addresses this.

Jim Simon wrote:Display Scaling should always be set to 100%.

If things are too small, then you need physically larger monitors.

My monitor is 32'' which I'd say is on the bigger side for a monitor, 100% on this 4k one hurts my eyes and a bigger monitor would be hard to work at

Display scaling is perfect at around 125% even 150% is what most people use, so Resolve should follow that like nearly every other program can manage.

A larger monitor would mean my head bobbling around all day to look at different areas which is uncomfortable

Devonavar wrote:I agree this needs to be looked at. I don't think it's as simple as inheriting Windows settings, because by default that will scale the video as well as the UI, which isn't what we want.

I think, if I'm not mistaken that Premiere Pro can handle this (I hate it for a variety of other reasons but they do have some good fundementals), and that it scales the UI but the videos itself are still at the natural scaling

It needs to be "fixed", that's for sure.

Every other applications were adapted to this a long time ago.

Especially the major ones. It's the first thing we see, the UI. And it should have (on top of scaling properly) an option to choose the level of scaling in the application itself too. So everybody is happy. You'll have all your applications behave the same way on your screen.

Besides that, it would change NOTHING for people who have their scaling at 100% (that's a response for the tiny minority who is against this change, for no other reasons than "just because").

It will happen eventually anyway.

Imagine reading people saying : you should buy a bigger screen... about smartphones when the developers don't use the tools at their disposal to scale their app properly like 99% of the other apps, or to people browsing the web and find websites still stuck in 2002. There is a reason we can change the size of a webpage itself with a simple ctrl+mouse wheel.

It's the same thing in this situation, but telling anyone to buy a bigger screen when the majority of the other applications adapt themselves perfectly is pure trolling and has not place on the forum. Especially without any logical and pragmatic explanation about "why" it would be bad, or problematic.