iMac Pro and Resolve Issue!

Hi all!

Big fan of Resolve, love it a lot, have been using it for about two years now.

In September of 2020, my Macbook Pro unfortunately left this Earthly realm and I decided to go big and go home, and grab an iMac Pro and basically max out all the possible things I could:

2.3 GHz 18-Core Intel Xeon W processor
128 GB 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM
Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB Video Card
4 TB Hard Disk
Studio version of Resolve

Needless to say, I thought this would be pretty snazzy, and it is!

Now to my problem. I shot a video in August on the BMPCC6K at 6K 60fps BRAW and edited it (colour, compositing, generally simple effects) in Resolve 16. The concept of the video was slow motion, and I was taking the footage to 24%, at Optical Flow with Enhanced Better, and Medium motion. This definitely was taxing on the computer, so I didn't do it often, and only set it to that for the exports.

On the iMac Pro, when I would export the full video (about 4 minutes at 6144x3456 ProRes), the computer would clearly be working hard, and the progress was very slow, going from 0.5 frames per second to 0 frames per second. The export would maybe get to 1 to 2% before the computer completely turns itself off. Upon turning the computer back on, there would be no error message, even from Davinci when I re-opened it. I genuinely don't know what I did to get a working version of it to export, but that was the only time. Every other time, the computer shuts down completely.

Things I have tried:
- Updating Resolve (initially just as high as the updates in 16 would go)
- Updating from OS Catalina to Big Sur
- Running benchmarking software and Apple Diagnostics, which came back as everything operating normally
- Installing temperature monitoring software to see if there were any major spikes or overall hot things going on, which resulted in nothing
- Searching to see if anyone else was having this issue (no results that I could find)
- Speaking to AppleCare directly, following their instructions (Resetting PRAM, SMC Reset, etc), until they finally suggested bringing it into an Apple Authorized Technician. I brought it to the one in my town, and he immediately dismissed a hardware issue and was convinced it was a software issue from the Apple OS not properly communicating with the fans, or possibly an issue with Resolve. His plan for fixing the issue was an Erase & Install of the OS, and reinstalling Resolve, to see if that fixed the issue.

fter having the iMac for over a month, he didn't do either of those things, so I took the computer back, and have done those things today, arriving at the exact same results.

I have a fresh installation of OS Catalina, have installed Resolve Studio 17 and it is the only non-native application on the computer currently, other than Firefox. I'm using the same settings as before, and the issue persists in exactly the same way. Does anyone have any thoughts/experience on this? I'm happy to provide any extra information people ask for. I'd like to get to the bottom of this before asking Apple if they'll just replace the computer entirely (although that may not even fix the problem?).

Thank you to anyone who has anything to say!

I would suggest
- To create a new Timeline, copy and paste the clips from the old one to the new one.
- Save As the project. Reopen it.
- Export the project, create a new Database, and Import the project back to the new Database.
- In Preferences, double check the GB RAM allocated to Resolve.
- Check if you are using any third party OFX plugin or LUT. Disable it if yes.

...and if you're running Studio that you send in a formal troubleshooting ticket along with the diagnostics and other logs the techs will want. They can easily suss out where the failure/s are once the have the data from your DR installation.

I would suggest
- To create a new Timeline, copy and paste the clips from the old one to the new one.
- Save As the project. Reopen it.
- Export the project, create a new Database, and Import the project back to the new Database.
- In Preferences, double check the GB RAM allocated to Resolve.
- Check if you are using any third party OFX plugin or LUT. Disable it if yes.

Hey William! Thanks for responding!

When you say timeline, just to clarify, do you mean a new project? Or do you mean a new timeline within the project?

With regards to the GB RAM allocated to Resolve, are there any guidelines for what it should be? Right now it's set to the max for Fusion (Memory Cache 72 GB) and Resolve (Memory usage 96 GB).

No third party plugins or LUTs being used.

Thanks for your advice so far!

...and if you're running Studio

Yes, sorry I didn't mention, it's Studio. Good catch and good call!