How to handle a big project

Hi,

I'm using DR Studio 19.1, build 12.

I'm making an puppetry/animation feature film. It's 81 minutes in length, with about 1500 clips so far. The clips are HD video footage, proxied, of rough animatic, which I am slowly replacing with finished animation. The finished 4K animation is composited together in fusion. So I'm going to end up with 1500 fusion clips. I currently have about 20 fusion clips in the timeline. In fusion I am greenscreening, some color grading (in addition to grading on the color page), making light wraps, and animating transform nodes, and that's it.

This seems to be too much for my computer, and the project crashes constantly, and I think it's due to the fact I'm using fusion. It crashes if I try to play back or scrub a fusion clip. However, I also get crashes when doing activities that have nothing to do with fusion, such as trying to export the animatic.

Here is a link to a diagnostics log created after the latest DR crash.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Yf8rT ... drive_link

This crash happened when I was exporting 50 minutes of my HD rough animation footage, no fusion clips involved. It can't export this footage without crashing. I used to be able to export the entire 81 minutes of HD footage no problem. I never had these problems before upgrading to DR Studio 19.

Basically I have a project that crashes all the time, for multiple suspected reasons, and it's a problem because I plan on making this project much bigger. I can't do any work on this project because of how often it crashes.

My questions for you:

1. Based on the diagnostic log, can you identify what caused my last crash?
2. if a professional editor was making a special-effects heavy feature film and compositing 1500 clips in fusion, would that editor work on the entire project in one big timeline, as I have done?
3. Is my computer adequate or inadequate for my project as I have described it, and if inadequate, what upgrades do I need to make?
4. What other useful information can I supply?

The first thing, and probably the cheapest to do here for hardware, is extending your RAM. It's definitely too small for any heavy Fusion work.
And then, it's a pretty good idea to separate those 80 minutes into smaller chunks. Heck, the first thing you could try is rendering in chunks of 20 minutes or so into a good intermediate codec.
If all of that doesn't help, do you have. backup from version 18? Are there features in 19 you desperately need? Yes, software is getting more demanding on the hardware by every major version.

I agree with everything Uli says above.

I would also add: 1500 Fusion shots in a single project? Good luck. (I would say the same thing about 1500 After Effects shots in a single project.)

I think you might be able to maybe have 10 Fusion shots spread out over 150 timelines, but I wouldn't try to create a single 90-minute timeline with everything in it... unless they were all rendered out, flattened files.

I would also budget for buying the fastest computer in the world, tons of RAM, and multiple GPUs (though Fusion is more CPU-based), because you're going to need it. Fusion is very, very demanding on hardware.

I agree with both Uli and Marc's suggestions. Especially upgrading your RAM. With 16gigs I think you would struggle to do all of the compositing shot by shot even in Fusion Standalone. Which, if your funds limit you, might be the only way to achieve your ambitious project.

It'd be worth exploring a single shot in Fusion Standalone and see if you can successfully get through it with your hardware. Make sure to try this without any other apps running, Fusion will use all of your resources in most cases.

If using Fusion Studio standalone does work, depending on how much of your comps can be templated, we can explore making an automated template for your shots. I used to do this with 1000s of composites in Fusion standalone before the Fusion tab existed in Resolve.

1. Based on the diagnostic log, can you identify what caused my last crash?

Download link requires access.

Maybe I do not understand the workflow, but it sounds like Render In Place would be your friend here.

1. Based on the diagnostic log, can you identify what caused my last crash?

Download link requires access.

Maybe I do not understand the workflow, but it sounds like Render In Place would be your friend here.

Sorry Stephen, my mistake. Please try the link for that previous crash log again: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... drive_link

I have just installed 64GB of RAM and attempted the same export, only to have it crash again. This particular timeline is 54m of graded HD footage, with perhaps 1 or 2 shots in this particular timeline being fusion comps. It has no problem rendering the fusion comps. Instead, Resolve crashed on the same shot twice, and the shot was nothing more than a pre-comp of an image sequence. I tried rendering it in place, to no avail, still crashing on the same shot upon render. There is about a TB of free space left on the drive.

There are 2 diagnostics logs in the folder I have shared, one is the one from my post a few days ago:
DaVinci-Resolve-logs-20241124-144401

The other is the crash log from what I have described above: DaVinci-Resolve-logs-20241128-223603

Thank you for your assistance!

The first thing, and probably the cheapest to do here for hardware, is extending your RAM. It's definitely too small for any heavy Fusion work.
And then, it's a pretty good idea to separate those 80 minutes into smaller chunks. Heck, the first thing you could try is rendering in chunks of 20 minutes or so into a good intermediate codec.

I think you might be able to maybe have 10 Fusion shots spread out over 150 timelines, but I wouldn't try to create a single 90-minute timeline with everything in it... unless they were all rendered out, flattened files.

Thank you, Uli and Marc, I have upgraded my RAM to 64GB and it's a massive improvement, I can actually scrub the timeline now. I am happy to use the "Render In Place" feature to surmount this issue, it seems to give me better results and I can decompose back to the fusion comp if needed. I think this is an acceptable solution to this aspect of my problem.

However, I don't understand why playing a timeline with 1500 fusion clips is different than playing back a timeline containing only one fusion clip. Da Vinci only plays one clip at a time (assuming I have just one track) -- so surely it only ever has to play back the clip currently under the playhead?

But anyway, I am actually still experiencing my issue with DR crashing upon export. Would you mind reading my previous post in this thread, my reply to Stephen Swaney, and see if you can help?

It'd be worth exploring a single shot in Fusion Standalone and see if you can successfully get through it with your hardware. Make sure to try this without any other apps running, Fusion will use all of your resources in most cases.

Thanks for the interesting suggestion, however I specifically switched to Resolve because Fusion was integrated into it, I like swapping back and forth. between NLE, compositing, and grading.

I've recently finished a 75 minute feature length 4k project, including some animation + a lot of grading, on a Mac Studio M2 32gb, and DaVinci coped fine – so this is really just a message to confirm that you should be expecting DaVinci to perform well. I've also done some editing of the project on a 2019 MacBook Pro, while travelling and the MacBook was happy too.

With large projects (and editing for 18 months), managing the edit well with well organised bins is a challenge, and it's good to work out a system at the outset of your edit.

I also work from 4TB SSDs for both the original media and a use another SSD drive for the proxy media & rendering, and this makes a significant difference to speed & performance while editing. With the old spinning hard drives, I would usually destroy one hard drive every project - with the high data throughput, but all the SSDs are still running happily.

With the old spinning hard drives, I would usually destroy one hard drive every project - with the high data throughput, but all the SSDs are still running happily.

That should not happen, at least not with enterprise class HDDs.
Of course, SSDs are faster by orders of magnitude.

Thank you, Uli and Marc, I have upgraded my RAM to 64GB and it's a massive improvement, I can actually scrub the timeline now. I am happy to use the "Render In Place" feature to surmount this issue, it seems to give me better results and I can decompose back to the fusion comp if needed. I think this is an acceptable solution to this aspect of my problem.

Yeah, render in place (or doing it as an actual render and then bringing the flattened shot back into Resolve) is a reasonable workflow for many TV shows and films. Just consider the VFX a separate project.

[quote[ However, I don't understand why playing a timeline with 1500 fusion clips is different than playing back a timeline containing only one fusion clip. Da Vinci only plays one clip at a time (assuming I have just one track) -- so surely it only ever has to play back the clip currently under the playhead?[/quote]
I'd say one Fusion shot in a timeline can be challenging, and 1500 of them could be a thousand times more difficult. Resolve will try to load most or all of the shots into RAM, and because Fusion is more demanding than the Color portion of Resolve, it'll stress out the system.

I think with a lot of post-production you have to pick your battles and figure out a workflow that will actually allow you to complete the project on schedule and on budget. Chopping this project up into 10 or 15 shorter timelines might be a valid solution.