Blackmagic Forum

HEIC images are the standard iPhone camera photo format, but DaVinci performance goes down the drain even from just having a single still HEIC photo in the timeline. Try to add some movement to the image and that section of the timeline gets very glitchy. Convert the photo to JPEG and it runs smoothly with the exact same photo resolution and movement. On rendering HEIC takes roughly ten times longer than JPG.

The issue existed already on version 19.0, and still exists on 20 Beta 2.

MacBook Pro 16 '21 (M1 Max)
macOS Sequoia 15.4
DaVinci Resolve Studio 20 Beta 2

Not on windows. I tested with chef and Sewing from https://heic.digital/samples/ and all Transform changes was smooth.

If you make a small project showing what you mean, it'd be enormously helpful. Dra if possible.

Mads Johansen wrote:If you make a small project showing what you mean, it'd be enormously helpful. Dra if possible.

Here you go. 60fps 1440p Timeline, zoomed in and panning JPG, then the exact same movement on the exact same photo exported as JPG in Mac's Preview. DaVinci 20 Beta 3 CPU utilization with no image: 52%. With JPG: 54%. With HEIC, around 100% and skipping most frames. Behavior has been similar since at least 19.0. Screen capture:



Here's the project archive (.dra):

https://mega.nz/file/Kw9SFRRZ#Y6oZ9PNFW ... G6eQmgmMDw

Yes! I get this same problem on my MacBook Pro M1 Max. Final Cut Pro can handle HEIC images no sweat... Davinci Resolve handles 4k footage no problem. Drop ONE single .heic image file... and the playback on Edit Page (in Resolve) just starts stuttering uncontrollably and playback is down to 8 frames per second.

It would be nice if the Mac version of DaVinci Resolve could handle normal playback of .HEIC image files.

mrelwood wrote:Here's the project archive (.dra):

I got full 60 fps playback using Studio 20b3 for Windows with an older 8 GB GTX 1070.

Yeah, so appears to be a problem with the Mac version.

In testing on my Windows machine the timeline played back without issue, though I did notice about a 50% increase in CPU load from about 9% to 15% when the HEIC clip was playing, also my RTX3090 went from about 6% utilization to 9% for the HEIC clip.

Out of curiosity, I took the HEIC image into Photoshop and exported as both a PSD and PNG (16-bit) and dropped those files into the timeline. Duplicated your zoom and pan for both those to the same effect you had done and they both played with the same CPU and GPU utilization as the JPG. You might consider doing so on your end and see if that helps.

Cheers!

Yes, I've also seen this degraded playback performance with HEIC iPhone photos on Mac.
My workaround have been to "Render in place" with handles.