Newb Questions: Gray Clips, Text to Subs, Magic Trackpad

Hi, I have a few (hopefully easy to solve) questions.

1. I made a compound clip and had to edit the grad inside that clip. So I did right click -> open in timeline. After I was done I clicked timeline 1 at the bottom right and came back to my timeline. Ever since then all other clips (except the compound clip) are grayed out:



and even though no media is missing, on the deliver page it now says: "One or more clips have missing or offline source frames. If you continue these frames will be rendered with a media offline graphic."

2. I have a whole lot of text+ and need an easy way to make subtitles out of them. I tried dragging and copying text to the subtitle lane without luck. Is there any way to do this or export text+ to .txt files or anything?


3. Coming from FCPX I just finished my first edit in Resolve. I experienced about 4-6 crashes, mono audio even though it audio in Resolve was stereo (restart helped), and a few other quirks. The most annoying thing to me is that I can not get Magic Trackpad gestures to work properly (zooming in and out with two fingers). I believe the way it should work is that pressing option + swiping up or down with two fingers zooms in and out. Moving with two fingers around (without option) navigates in the image. At least most of the time it works like that. But somehow there always comes a moment when this behavior changes and moving with two fingers (without option) zooms in and out of the picture and pressing option does nothing. If it is like that I have no way to navigate inside the image. Closing and reopening Resolve gets me back to the expected zooming with option behavior. Am I missing something?

All of your issues are part of the growing pains of transitioning from one NLE to another.

For the subtitles, you might want to play with Resolve's native subtitles in a test project, before you commit to converting the text to subtitles. Resolve's subtitles probably don't offer the formatting flexibility you expect, unless you're positive you want broadcast-style closed captions. There's a good chance Text+ titles are actually what you want.

There isn't an automatic, easy, built-in way to convert between text and titles in Resolve. HOWEVER internally, both the text+ nodes in Fusion and the .srt files used by resolve's captions are technically plaintext, and you (or someone) could conceivably create a tool to translate one format to the other. I'd honestly be surprised if someone hasn't already done that, but depending on how much you need to convert, it might be faster to just copy/paste to a text editor. The devs here are really good about implementing highly-requested features, so if you feel strongly about it, it can't hurt to ask.

I believe the "greyness" of the clips to which refer merely denotes that you've applied some effect to the clip. If you zoom in to the timeline, you should see a badge on the lower right of all clips with an effect. If there's a 1:1 correspondence between this badge and the dimming, then yes, we're talking about the same thing. To deliberately disable/enable a clip, select it, and press "D". Disabled clips should look even dimmer than the ones in your screenshot. A media offline graphic is unrelated to either of these things, and is usually caused by the file on disk disappearing through circumstances outside of Resolve's control... Renaming one of the files in Finder, or ejecting the disk containing it will cause it to go offline in Resolve, for example. Timecode, proxies, and caches are the other likely culprits.

Software crashes. Resolve's minimum specs are pretty hefty. 4-6 crashes over the course of a *project* is in line with what I'd expect from any NLE. If you're getting 4-6 crashes a *day*, then you might have a hardware configuration issue. I'm currently about 30 billable hours into a Premiere job, and I've had to force-quit at least that many times, and I've had 2 or 3 hard crash "Premiere unexpectedly quit..." episodes.

The trackpad thing isn't something to hold your breath over, because: A) Apple's trackpad interaction with FCPX is something they guard with lawyers. and B) If BMD copied Apple, they'd alienate their Windows and Linux users.
**Edit**
I think I misread the bit about the trackpad. The gestures and behavior inside Resolve should be consistent within the context of the workspace; i.e. an option two-finger swipe left will always do the same thing whenever the pointer starts over the edit page timeline. Behavioral consistency across pages is something of a work-in-progress, I think, but if you pay attention to the release notes, you'll notice fairly regular tweaks.

"Normal" trackpad interaction would suffice, like in Premiere Pro where it works just fine as well. Trackpads and mice have seemingly never been a priority for Resolve given how bad it still is to this day. In some ways I can understand it. Seasoned keyboard editors are faster with just keys and BMD sells hardware. But there's so much untapped potential and to me it doesn't make sense.

Thanks for your help!

There isn't an automatic, easy, built-in way to convert between text and titles in Resolve. HOWEVER internally, both the text+ nodes in Fusion and the .srt files used by resolve's captions are technically plaintext, and you (or someone) could conceivably create a tool to translate one format to the other. I'd honestly be surprised if someone hasn't already done that, but depending on how much you need to convert, it might be faster to just copy/paste to a text editor. The devs here are really good about implementing highly-requested features, so if you feel strongly about it, it can't hurt to ask.

That's too bad. There wasn't one in FCPX either but there is an app that creates subtitles from text layers in different formats like srt or txt. I was using this feature to upload subtitles to youtube in addition to the text in the video. This way viewers have the option to additionally add subtitles where they have control over the size, color, and background.
Do you have any idea where I could search for such a tool or how I can get in touch with devs?

I believe the "greyness" of the clips to which refer merely denotes that you've applied some effect to the clip. If you zoom in to the timeline, you should see a badge on the lower right of all clips with an effect. If there's a 1:1 correspondence between this badge and the dimming, then yes, we're talking about the same thing. To deliberately disable/enable a clip, select it, and press "D". Disabled clips should look even dimmer than the ones in your screenshot.

There are badges on the lower right of some clips but they do not seem to have any relation to whether they are gray or not:

A media offline graphic is unrelated to either of these things, and is usually caused by the file on disk disappearing through circumstances outside of Resolve's control... Renaming one of the files in Finder, or ejecting the disk containing it will cause it to go offline in Resolve, for example. Timecode, proxies, and caches are the other likely culprits.

I do not see any media offline graphics anywhere. In the media library, the timeline, and all other pages there are no clips missing and there are also no missing images or anything in the final export file. I only see a warning popup when I am on the deliver page, hitting "add to render queue".

Software crashes. Resolve's minimum specs are pretty hefty. 4-6 crashes over the course of a *project* is in line with what I'd expect from any NLE. If you're getting 4-6 crashes a *day*, then you might have a hardware configuration issue. I'm currently about 30 billable hours into a Premiere job, and I've had to force-quit at least that many times, and I've had 2 or 3 hard crash "Premiere unexpectedly quit..." episodes.

I see. I have experienced about 4-6 crashes of FCPX over the last 2 years with many projects and was not aware that this happens so frequently in other NLEs!

I think I misread the bit about the trackpad. The gestures and behavior inside Resolve should be consistent within the context of the workspace; i.e. an option two-finger swipe left will always do the same thing whenever the pointer starts over the edit page timeline. Behavioral consistency across pages is something of a work-in-progress, I think, but if you pay attention to the release notes, you'll notice fairly regular tweaks.

The thing is the inconsistency of the gestures is in the viewer of the edit page. Zooming in works as expected and a few minutes later it is not. Is there an official bug report thread somewhere?

Yeah the trackpad gestures have some issues.

Firstly, pinch to zoom in the viewer did work up until 17.3.2 - mostly. It was always a bit glitchy, but you could do it. Then in 17.4 it stopped working completely without warning or explanation, and now it just does a weird juddering thing.

And yes, Option+two fingers is the intended zoom method, and two-fingers pans around, but sometimes it gets 'stuck' in the zoom mode. I couldn't trigger it just now to test, but I think I remember that just clicking on the viewer is enough to get it working as normal again. It definitely is fixable without restarting Resolve.

There's no bug report forum or thread, just this forum. Or if you're a Studio user, you can contact BMD support direct (details in the FAQ).

I am having similar issues.

I have Fusion and Text+ titles graphics in my project and am getting the same
"One or more clips have missing or offline source frames.
If you continue these frames will be
rendered with a media offline graphic."
message as the OP.

These titles appear normally on my timeline and playback.

What must I do to actually render them? What do I not know?


PS - I'm on a Mac, M1 chip, Davinci v17