Large media pool and timeline, slowness

Greetings. Here's a .drp for a project I'm trying to work with, bat facing slowness or unresponsiveness in Resolve. It has 38K clips in the pool, and about 3K in the timeline. I tried on win10 DR Studio 18.1.2, and Linux DRS 18.1. Using local project database (not server but will try that).

https://www.kensystem.com/videos/resolv ... -86176.zip

I'm curious what others see when they try to load and test. For me:

-Project load: >5 min
-Select multiple clips and add keywords: up to 5 or 10 mins to complete
-Blade cut the timeline: over 30 minutes and DR is unresponsive

I realize not having the media is a barrier but may still be be possible to try this timeline-only tests..

By my layman estimation, this seems to be a database (sqlite or indexes) or code optimization thing... I also realize one approach would be to break up my timelines into smaller pieces, but that really to me would be a workaround, and I'm not sure fixes the metadata (keyword tagging) aspect...

Thanks in advance for any helpful advice..

Resolve 18.1.2

On my 16" M1 Max with 64GB RAM this project takes 90 seconds to load.
During that time Resolve is taking 100% of a CPU core and is unresponsive - the cursor is a beachball.

Also note that, with dynamic project switching enabled, it takes 90 seconds to switch to this project. Same behavior as load.

Blade and multi-clip keywording seem to run at normal speed on my machine.

Resolve 18.1.2
...
Blade and multi-clip keywording seem to run at normal speed on my machine.

Thanks Joe - I'd tried this as well on two other newer Ryzen and and old Intel Macbook, and I cant seem to attain the "normal" speed... it is slow for me. I Guess I need to upgrade to an M2!!

Wow! What a PITA!

The project took more than 2 minutes just to load into my Database. Another 5 minutes to open, and then another 4 minutes for Resolve to become responsive after it opened.

Even then, the GUI was often slow to respond to various commands, like opening the Inspector. Playback couldn't get above 25 fps, despite the fact there was no actual media to decode.

Did I see correctly that your timeline is over 40 hours?!?!

i5-2500K
RTX 3060 12 GB VRAM
2 TB SSD

To me this is a good drp for the Resolve devs to open and profile just to make sure Resolve isn't spending time in some unexpected way. Usually things like this are a bit of poorly-written code that has snuck in because it doesn't bog the system down in ordinary circumstances so nobody noticed it. But fixing the code can have positive results for everyone because it speeds everyone up.

Greetings. Here's a .drp for a project I'm trying to work with, but facing slowness or unresponsiveness in Resolve. It has 38K clips in the pool, and about 3K in the timeline. I tried on win10 DR Studio 18.1.2, and Linux DRS 18.1. Using local project database (not server but will try that).

I'd say 38,000 clips in the Media Page and 3000 clips in the timeline is a big mofo project.

My advice would be:

1) delete all the clips you're not using (assuming you've locked the project)

2) on the assumption that this is a feature, chop the timelines down to a reasonable level, like maybe 20-25 minutes and no more than 600-700 clips

3) what specific hardware are you using? Very, very powerful hardware can handle big projects, but a lot depends on the specific codecs involved. Fast drives will be a must as well, as will be lots of RAM.

4) what timeline settings are you using? If these are 4K or 6K or 8K file, you'll probably get better editing performance working in HD for choosing specific clips, then switching to maximum resolution for the final delivery.

5) in worst-case scenarios, we've had to cut the project in half and put half of the source files (and timelines) in one project, and half in the other project. That helps improve response time and makes it possible for us to review and deliver the project quickly and efficiently. This problem goes up exponentially if you start adding NR, OFX effects, and other processor-intensive operations into each shot.

I have heard from a support person at BMD that dev is going to at least take a peek at this project and make sure it's not eating resources in some unexpected way. If they find something wrong then hopefully it'll be addressed in the next release. Since they don't tell us anything about upcoming releases, we'll just have to wait and see if it gets better in the next version.

In the meantime what Marc suggests are all good strategies. He's good at this.

Takes 40 seconds to import into my database on my humble laptop. But then, opening it takes 2:40 until I have access to the timeline, with the progress bar stuck at 97 or 98% most of the time.
Switching to the Inspector for any active clip is nearly immediate, just like jumping around in that huge timeline or selecting clips.
Playback of such nothingness is at about 10-12 fps, but from the point where there is only one audio track (around 19 hrs and one minute), it runs at full speed (59.94).
Blade cuts are immediate, but without clips, of course.

Hello BMD team - if you're reading this - I'm hoping the Devs have been able to reproduce it, and working on a fix?

I started a whole other project and running into the same thing. This time, I thought I could work around it by tagging clips with colors (batch selecting them in the media pool, then hitting my assigned hotkey), then later Smart Bin filter to show only those, and apply my keywords - but unfortunately the same thing happens - the color-bot shows over them thumbs immediately, but they don't all seem to commit to the database (probably the same very-slow SQL INSERT rate / queue I described before). So in the end I have to keep going back and re-coloring and re-tagging - I've had to pause the project.

I am delighted to report this slowness is resolved - I can now bulk-select + add keywords and have much faster performance (Studio 18.1.4 on Linux). Thank you BMD team!

I would still lobby for improvement - as mentioned I also use Darktable for (image) bulk tagging and organization and (with sidecar files turned off) - it acts nearly instantaneously on 1000x of files selected at a time (over 300K files) when adding and removing keywords. I might also Darktable's authors have done a REALLY, really nice on on the UX and ability to build compound rules (equiv of Smart Bins). If Resolve could mimic some of that, well.... imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I am delighted to report this slowness is resolved - I can now bulk-select + add keywords and have much faster performance (Studio 18.1.4 on Linux). Thank you BMD team!

I have to say, we're in the process of wrapping a feature with four kinds of footage (mostly R3D 5K, ProRes, H.264, and graphics), and on a whim, I just let it stay loaded and had a single timeline for the entire 100-minute feature. Much to my surprise... performance was fine across 1600 clips in one timeline. This is a big improvement over my last 4K feature done last year in 17.4.6.

We did Media Manage a 20TB initial project down to 3TB on an SSD RAID0, but it's been fine so far. Lots of OFX, external mattes, extreme looks, all kinds of stuff... "in general," smooth as glass on the Mac Pro. The only slowdowns we ran into were multi-layered transitions with 3-4 layers of 5K, and those we had to cache. There were maybe 70 of those in the whole picture, out of 1600 shots... which to me is not bad at all.

Destined for broad theatrical release, Mark?

Might you spill the title?

Destined for broad theatrical release, Mark? Might you spill the title?

Ehhhhhh... I may have mentioned it on Facebook. I'll post a trailer when they have it done.

Nice to do a 2023 movie instead of my usual 1980s/1990s film restorations.