Audio Waveforms

Hi All,

I have been using Resolve for over a year now and really enjoying it. I have come from AVID, Premier Pro and Edius.

Just trying to understand the issue with audio waveforms. I have never seen this in any other video editing software. I have worked with all of the common suggestions offered in the forum here and on YT to reveal stubborn waveforms in Resolve so I am not a complete NuBe to the issue.

I just don't understand the inconsistency. Sometimes, in some projects, it is instantly available and other times it may take up to 10 minutes before the waveform shows up! Is this a problem with projects that have a lot of media? Any hints, tips and advice would be appreciated.

Not to be negative here but I have to say that I am a little surprised that we are at 18.x and the software is having problems creating waveforms ...

Is this behaviour isolated to particular source media?

Are you running macOS Monterey or Ventura?

I just upgraded to Ventura, hoping that would help, but it did not seem to make much difference.

Audio from MXF Video files generated by the Canon R5C seem to take the longest to generate.

Is there a setting to have audio waveforms auto-generated as soon as media is imported into the bins? This would probably solve the problem as I could leave the program on overnight and start with all waveforms in ...

This is how it seemed to work with other editors. I have never noticed missing waveforms before...

Is there a setting to have audio waveforms auto-generated as soon as media is imported into the bins?

That happens by default, and there's no way to turn it off.

It is not happening for me. I can have clips imported to a bin for weeks, but it still has no waveform when I drop it onto the timeline.

I often projects that are 1 TB or so - 4 to 6 hours of 4K footage, some with 8 audio tracks. When I drag all of it into a single Timeline, I can watch the waveforms draw. It can take a while with that much footage, so I will just let the app idle for a while.

I had your issue previously, and according to a forum post here, the advice was to change the Project Settings > Cache files location to the boot drive. I did this, which helped. But, later I changed it back to my big RAID, and the issue didn't repeat. So, the "fix" may have just been a coincidence, OR maybe changing the cache location back and forth unstuck it. Anyway, that was about a year ago, and now I expect they'll show up eventually.

As I recall, Avid of the nineties used to load audio waveforms into RAM every time you opened the app. FCP, Pr, and I presume Resolve writes waveforms to disk for faster redraws and less waiting. Resolve creates an "audio" folder in the Resolve Media > Cache Clip folder.

My issue does seem to be specific to the MXF files produced by the Canon R5C. After waiting 30 min for a Waveform file to show up in the timeline on a MXF interview, I exported the media to a wav file and the waveform of the Wav was instantaneous.

How long is your MXF file (how many minutes)? Just curious. Is it Canon RAW or h265?

It is not happening for me. I can have clips imported to a bin for weeks, but it still has no waveform when I drop it onto the timeline.

I'm saying that's not normal.

Although, I have heard that Resolve does have issues with Canon audio.

I have a similar experience with XAVC and XFAVC compressed MXF files from Sony & Canon.

When I would monitor the waveform generation I would notice it was writing each track of audio simultaneously instead of one track at a time. My worry was that this method would slow down drive access read times significantly as it's not doing the processing by track order.

It's mostly boiled down, for me, to just build proxies for the majority of in-camera compressed long GOP codecs. Which is generally a good idea regardless. It's annoying sometimes, and not consistent. Occasionally waveform generation is snappy and fast. So while I don't have a definite answer, it's clearly not a cut and dry situation.

I really can’t reproduce the issue here. If I activate the audio waveform for the viewer in the media page and drop 1.5 hours of a movie into it, my humble laptop needs 45 seconds until the waveform is shown.

After that, the waveform is available in the edit page too.