Resolve 18.1.1 is exhaustingly buggy

I'm not trying to just complain, but I'm genuinely so exhausted. Do I even bother reporting every bug one by one, step by step? Will it make sense to fill out bug reports, or does nobody in BMD test on Windows with AMD cards?

First, the vertical timelines. They've always been buggy, even before being officially introduced. Effects like color stabilizer just wouldn't let me set the region to anything that wasn't within a landscape format. I thought, OK, 18.1 fixed that. But no.

(1)
Step 1: create a MC clip - 3 cameras, 1 audio, landscape.
Step 2: create a landscape timeline with it. Do some edits.
Step 3: duplicate the landscape timeline and change it to 1080x1350 or 1080x1920 vertical timeline. Set the the scaling to "Scale to fit".

At this point, during editing, I can manually zoom on every clip in the Edit page. When I render it, is reverts everything to letterboxed format. Render and Edit page give different results. Yes, I've cleaned all cache. This magically goes away if I set the timeline settings to "Scale with crop". Again, just to be 100% clear - I did set every single individual clip to zoom at least to 2.25 (6k footage => HD timeline), and it showed correctly in the Cut/Edit/Color page.

(2) Now even the normal landscape orientation bugs out. Just one frame where the zoom jumps back to a value I didn't set, which doesn't show in Edit page.

(3) That one time when Fusion would just act weird with a vertical timeline. Somehow the render output was set to 3840x2160 (project default) but the moment I touched some control (forgot which), it jumped to 1080x1920 or whatever was the TL resolution, and it worked afterwards.

I'm sure there's more, but at this point, I'm extremely tired. I don't have any hardcore super-complicated edits. It shouldn't be this easy to find bugs in Resolve.

Example.

This is what I see in the Edit page. Witness: no keyframes. The underlying MC doesn't have any keyframes either. Nothing in Fusion. No keyframing in Color.

as seen on Edit page

Screenshot 2022-12-01 161511.jpg (370.57 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

This is what Edit page shows WHILE moving through the timeline by dragging the playhead with mouse. NOT while playing back. NOT while jumping. ONLY while holding the mouse button down.

while scrubbing and holding the mouse down

Screenshot 2022-12-01 161545.jpg (609.48 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

This is what happens ONLY in the first frame of every cut.

render - first frame after a cut

Screenshot 2022-12-01 161748.jpg (179.67 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

The following frames -- I'll have to show in another post, because of the inexplicable 3-image limit.

To reiterate - this is the rest of the clip AFTER the first frame, in the rendered result.

the zoom is gone

Screenshot 2022-12-01 161804.jpg (204.8 KiB) Viewed 1356 times

This is garbage. In a better world I wouldn't waste 6 hours editing footage only for Resolve to just merrily ignore half of all the edits I make and ??? corrupt the project or whatever is going on.

Also there are some vertical lines in my Media page for no reason.

behold, mysterious vertical lines

Screenshot 2022-12-01 171224.jpg (63.83 KiB) Viewed 1323 times

"Mysterious vertical lines" are In/Out marks aren't they?

As Roger says, those lines indicate I/O points that are set. If the clip is used a red line appears between them.

Ah, fair point, I haven't noticed those before. With all the other bugs going on, I'm suspicious of everything.

A few more hours of work and it turns out that the one-frame jump, and Resolve ignoring all my zooms and pans was triggered by an OFX plugin in the MC clip color grade - it's NeatVideo 5.5.6, an otherwise superb denoise plugin.

I've tried adding NeatVideo at the end of the chain, in my final timeline, in some random clip's color grade, and that worked without any apparent bugs. Of course it's useless to me there, I want denoise to run as close to the source footage of course.

So, there are basically two options. Either the OFX design is flawed and this particular OFX plugin breaks zoom, even if it's outside of its jurisdiction; or the OFX implementation is flawed in Resolve, or perhaps rather something related to optimizing the flow of footage through various parts of the system.

When I disabled NeatVideo and replaced it with BCC Noise Reduction, the bug went away... and the render time jumped from 45 minutes to 140 minutes, with lower quality result.

I'm thinking I will try to add NeatVideo on the MC timeline grade, instead of individual clips, which should be good enough as they're all ISO1250 from 6k and 6k Pro cameras, in this case, but even if that works, this is a pretty nasty bug to hit.

For more visual people, try playing these side by side for comparison - they're rendered from the same timeline, with just the NeatVideo / BCC Noise Reduction difference (+ a few other differences in temperature, midtone detail, black level curve, but all the same node tree otherwise) :

It could be that the temporal NR of NeatVideo does this, because it has to fetch several frames and there could be a bug with the communication between Resolve and NeatVideo.

You could check if there is a newer version of NeatVideo addressing this issue, or write a bug report to Vlad from NeatVideo. Usually he is very fast in addressing those bugs if it’s on his side.

It could be that the temporal NR of NeatVideo does this, because it has to fetch several frames and there could be a bug with the communication between Resolve and NeatVideo.

Yes. There is a remark about this in the "known issues" section of Neat Video's website.

Thank you for the replies gentlemen, but the Known Issues I see there are

This seems to be caused by a bug or functional limitation of Resolve itself.

While the problem is being investigated by the developers of Resolve, we recommend to not apply two temporal effects together in Resolve for now.

Current versions of DaVinci Resolve do not support correct operation of temporal effects applied to: ...

Do not apply temporal effects, including Neat Video, to those elements in Resolve to avoid incorrect rendering results.

Resolve serves to Neat Video incorrect frames or frames in an incorrect order when

Here's what bugging me in 18.1.1
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=171367

I wish I had saved my old database and could roll back to version 18.0.