Davinci Resolve 17 Free version won't run

I have been a Pinnacle Studio user for around 15 years from version 7 up to version 22 and have been increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the product and its support.

Over the years I have been urged to try Davinci Resolve and have looked at versions 14, 15 and 16 but not gone very far with any of them because of fear of the learning curve against the need to produce product. Covid-19 killed most of my business but now that it is starting to revive I decided to seriously investigate Davinci.

In view of my experience with Pinnacle Studio, however, I want to try the product and its support before finally committing so I wanted to start with the free version. Which is described on the web site as offering virtually everything that exists in the studio version.

So, I downloaded and installed Davinci Resolve 17. There were no problems with the install.

However, when I attempted to load the program, it crashed with a message that Davinci Resolve had quit unexpectedly. I made use of the option to submit a report. (And I uninstalled 17, rebooted, and tried again with the same result)

Since I did not did not expect to be contacted as a result of submitting the report, and since there were no clues about what the problem might be I suspected that looking for email help from the forum might be difficult, so I decided to try the phone option suggested on the support page.

I discovered that there is no support offered for the free version, except from the forum. So, I am trying the forum.

For the record, I normally do my video work on a PC desktop with a 3.3 i5 processor and 16 gigs, and an upmarket graphics card whose specs I don't recall offhand. At the moment I am taking advantage of some slack time away from home to check things out on a Dell laptop - nothing special and very slow wifi, but it works - and i'm not expecting blazing performance, only the ability to get familiar with how the system works.

So, if the forum can help, I will be very grateful.

What do you call an up market graphics card? Is its driver up to date? The GPU is a vital part for running Resolve.

Resolve produces extensive log files that are very useful in determining why it crashes or fails to start.
Assuming you're on windows, there's a .bat file in the installation directory that will create a zip of the logs on your desktop. The text file in there called ResolveDebug is the most useful - it's human readable - look for Error lines at the time of the crash.
My hunch would be that it's graphics card related.

Thanks for the suggestion

I found two batch files. I didn't know which was the one I was supposed to run, so I tried both.

Each of them opened a command window that ended up with a prompt that read:
Resolve communication is open and waiting.......
and is obviously waiting for my input, but I don't know what to input!

[Peter Chamberlain]

Please see the FAQs

I consulted the Faq's, found the batch file, ran it, reviewed the ResolveDebug.txt file and found two errors and a warning.

I don't have the background or experience to interpret them, so i am uploading the file in the hope that you will assist with this.

John, here is how to post logs.

So, I downloaded and installed Davinci Resolve 17. There were no problems with the install.

However, when I attempted to load the program, it crashed with a message that Davinci Resolve had quit unexpectedly. I made use of the option to submit a report. (And I uninstalled 17, rebooted, and tried again with the same result)

So, if the forum can help, I will be very grateful.

You will find the Davinci Resolve debug log at the following default location on a Windows machine:

C:\Users\{your login name]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\logs

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Look for a file called: ResolveDebug.txt

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Notably, I have tried installing and running Davinci Resolve on Windows laptop with just Intel graphics. The laptop has a SATA SSD and 16GB of ram. Although it is "usable", render caching in the edit tab is a struggle, and deliver tab render times are long.

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On a desktop machine with a recent AMD or Intel CPU with 8 or more cores, and 32GB or more of RAM, plus a recent dedicated nVidia RTX GPU it is possible to observe render times of 120 frames per second or more, depending on the amount of Fusion graphics and such.

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Video editing clearly requires both GPU acceleration and as much RAM and CPU capacity as possible for speedy results.

Following the above instructions, I have uploaded the two files to Onedrive where they can be accessed via this link: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjCtLM-a73tmhSVugCV ... k?e=l8nfgD
Thanks

From the logs, it looks like you're running with 8GB of RAM with an Intel graphics card with 1.6GB VRAM. It's just not enough. Some programs will just be very sluggish when presented with insufficient resources but Resolve does seem to just ungracefully crash in that scenario.

I think the only resolution here is to use hardware that meets the minimum specs.

Thank you to all who responded. That seems to wrap it up.

Hi everyone,

I am new here and am facing issue with running Resolve on my computer at work. It is an old PC but I was still able to edit until March 25th, 2021. It can render but I usually do it on my home PC which has better specs.
The splash screen won't even show up. On task manager, the Resolve process is suspended after 5 seconds.

Based on the log, could any of you give me some advice please:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmcYPaP1maHKguo5OsK ... g?e=XL1GhW

Gratefully appreciated!

Hi Joan.He,

It looks like it always fails after detecting your two monitors. The line that always followed that when it started successfully is

"Compute API set to automatic, defaulting to OpenCL."

Doesn't mean anything to me but it's graphics related. I can't see any obvious differences in the lines before then between the successful and unsuccessful starts so it doesn't look any any system changes have occurred.

I can't help beyond that but hopefully someone else may spot something.

Hi SwansongMedia,

Thank you for taking the time in looking into it. I was able to fix it if it is considered a fix.
I was curious if Resolve will run with my graphic card. I did a clean drivers installation, uninstalled the old one, and uninstall/reinstall Davinci Resolve. Resolve, still did not start. The log states no ERROR message as previously returned.

Anyhow, by reading the threads on this post, I was wondering if renaming the folder "Davinci Resolve" would help clear any defective settings.

C:\Users\[login name]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve -- (Davinci Resolve.old)

Hourray!! it worked with the GPU's machine! I could also retrieve any projects from copying from the following folder:

C:\Users\[login name]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve.old\Support\Resolve Disk Database\Resolve Projects\Users\guest\Projects

I hope this may help if anyone encounter the same or similar issue.

That's really interesting.

That folder contains all the user preferences and software configuration options like the path to the database(s) and paths to folders to store project backups etc. By renaming it, you're forcing Resolve to recreate all of those settings with default values.

So it seems a setting or value somewhere had changed or become corrupted and that was what was tripping Resolve up.

If you were really bored, you could compare the files in the newly created and old folders to see what's different! The files in the Preferences folder are all human readable text files.

Thanks for reporting back - it's really useful to know that you can safely wipe out those preferences to start again with a clean config.

Hi SwansongMedia,

Thank you for taking the time in looking into it. I was able to fix it if it is considered a fix.
I was curious if Resolve will run with my graphic card. I did a clean drivers installation, uninstalled the old one, and uninstall/reinstall Davinci Resolve. Resolve, still did not start. The log states no ERROR message as previously returned.

Anyhow, by reading the threads on this post, I was wondering if renaming the folder "Davinci Resolve" would help clear any defective settings.

C:\Users\[login name]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve -- (Davinci Resolve.old)

Hourray!! it worked with the GPU's machine! I could also retrieve any projects from copying from the following folder:

C:\Users\[login name]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve.old\Support\Resolve Disk Database\Resolve Projects\Users\guest\Projects

I hope this may help if anyone encounter the same or similar issue.

Your fix works for me just one time, then after that, I'm stuck again... the splash screen hangs and then goes away entirely, and nothing.

The only workaround for me has been to run Davinci in Windows 8 compatibility mode by right-clicking the icon. I suspect the recent Windows update OR Nvidia drivers update from 2 weeks ago is the culprit. I was actually on Davinci version 16 when it stopped for me, so I upgraded to 17. Neither would start after that update. I am now on the newest build of Windows, and the newest drivers for NVidia. Both NVidia Studio and Game drivers have the issue (a new Game driver came down on 4/1, but no fix to that... nothing new for Studio since things broke about 3/17, after either their latest driver, or when I updated to Windows 10.09042 Build 19042, about the same day.

My machine:
Intel I5 10400
32GB DDR4 Ram
Samsung NVME SSD
Gigabyte mainboard
Gigabyte GeForce 1650 Super 4gb VRAM

I am on an HP Envy i7 machine. All my specs say 17.1.1 should run and it was running a lower version earlier.

AVG Tuneup did a driver update and it broke my software. It was working before and was now giving me a GPU error and would hang up and not open. I went back to HP and installed an HP video driver for the NVIDIA graphics card and now everything is working great with 17.1.1.

You may have to go back and download your computer specific driver if other fixes don't work. I spent over a day on trying to figure this out and it was really just simply putting in the driver specific for my brand of computer.

Hope this helps.