Resolve 18 - Mac Studio Max - 8K rendering with plugin probl

Hello all.
First time user here, but long time as an editor in the biz fixing this sort of thing.


Problem.

I'm rendering H265 8K Canon 5C VR 180 footage to PRORES 422LT, using a plugin called STmapper and some KaraVR add ons through Fusion Reactor. (The Hugh Hou method.)

Workflow is to prepare the dailies by adding the STmapper plugin to stitch and export individual files. (ST mapper is performing a warp effect to unwrap the fisheye lens to stretch the frame to a 4 corner square for each eye, in a single frame.)

Delivery will initiate correctly, rendering at around 25 fps, using the GPU to its max capacity, using memory at about 14-16 GB,m and generally leaving all 8 CPU cores pretty unstressed.

Eventually, sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes after a couple of hours, the render frame rate will drop to 1-3 fps, and the GPU CPU workload get swapped around, with all CPU cores maxed out, and the GPU under stressed.

This problem seems to be independent of export frame size, its the same issue whether 4K or 8K.

My only resolution that works is to restart Resolve and kick the render off again.

It's possible I just don't have enough RAM, which is not something I can change, but I thought I'd reach out here and see if it sounds or seems familiar to anyone, and if there are any tips to reduce the memory load on the system while rendering.

Is resolve trying to cache the whole clip for example?
Some of the clips are over an hour long.

Thank you in advance.

While such Macs with Apple silicon are quite capable, they can’t compete with a serious workstation.
You may experience some thermal throttling. What happens if you reduce the render speed a bit?
OTOH, one can’t exclude some memory leak, which we can’t fix from our side. You could render in smaller chunks and later string them together.

Thank you Uli.

I'll look into how to reduce the render speed and give it a try.

This looks more like the GPU is just giving up, and passing the load entirely onto the CPU's.

I'll post an update either way.

following up Uli.

Try as I might I cannot find a setting to reduce the render speed on a Mac.

The manual suggests it IS a command in a drop down menu, but does not state which one, and the only guidance I could find was that it would be found in the FILE menu.

It is not, sadly.

I appreciate you sound like you're working on a PC, but does this sound correct to you?

If anyone else is seeing anything similar on a Mac Studio Max M1, basically the GPU giving up and letting the CPU's take over the workload, badly, I'd love to start a conversation.



Thank you.

to reduce render speed, in teh delivery page, under [file], there is a [render speed] dropdown usually setup for [Maximum]

choose some other option (like 5fps) and see if alleviate teh thermal throttling/leaks...

For rendering, see below (scroll to the end).

Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-26 um 11.03.24.png (232.86 KiB) Viewed 764 times

Many thanks.

You've saved me a lot of frustration.
Everyone in my household is grateful.

Have a great weekend.

I'm still fairly sure there is some issue with 18.1.2 (Windows user)

I have a 2 hour project which I cannot render in one pass, it will always just crash to desktop a random way through the render. I have even dropped the render speed to as low as 10 at some point and still it can fail at anything from 10% to 90%.

The only way I can deliver this project is to render it in 15 minute chunks and then stitch them all together and then render THAT out.

Even then sometimes the 15 minute chunk fails to render first time. I know my GPU (nVidia 970M 6GB) is hardly top of the range, but I never had this sort of issue with v17.

Maybe I need to roll back to 17 and live with that for now.

Like most software, DR is getting more demanding with every full version.
It might be a clever solution to stick with the older version if your GPU is not such a beast.

But please note that this thread is about a current Mac, and a pretty strong one. There must be another issue with that machine.

I can add that its performing a Mesh Warp and frame resize on each frame of a VR 180 project shot at 8192 X 4320 and delivered at 8192 x 4096

Pretty taxing stuff.

I'm still fairly sure there is some issue with 18.1.2 (Windows user)

I have a 2 hour project which I cannot render in one pass, it will always just crash to desktop a random way through the render. I have even dropped the render speed to as low as 10 at some point and still it can fail at anything from 10% to 90%.

The only way I can deliver this project is to render it in 15 minute chunks and then stitch them all together and then render THAT out.

Even then sometimes the 15 minute chunk fails to render first time. I know my GPU (nVidia 970M 6GB) is hardly top of the range, but I never had this sort of issue with v17.

Maybe I need to roll back to 17 and live with that for now.

Dave, resolve require a lot of power in GPU, and new tools wants the new CUDA instructions and core more than the previous version.

That card is a notebook card and it is 8 years old... you might need to upgrade o stick to an older version of resolve as mentioned (v15 for example).