Blackmagic Forum

What happens now: If you have several long clips in a timeline Resolve will generate waveform for the first one. Then nothing.
Then you move the playhead for file 2: resolve will generate waveform. Nothing.
Then you move the playhead for file 3: resolve will generate waveform. Nothing.

If you have several files visible in the timeline, resolve will generate waveforms in parallel (meaning that the hard drive will be hammered with IO requests).

What I want:
Same setup: Several long clips in a timeline. Resolve generates waveform for file 1. Resolve generates waveform for file 2. Resolve generates waveform for file 3 and so on.
Same thing with more than one file visible: Sequential reads for each file.

Mads Johansen wrote:What happens now: If you have several long clips in a timeline Resolve will generate waveform for the first one. Then nothing.

That's never been true for me. I get them all, without moving the playhead.

I never had this problem, all waveforms are automatically generated no matter where the playhead is or if the clips are visible or not.

I agree with the feature request though, waveform generation on HDD's is very slow with some codecs. DaVinci is trying to read multiple files in parallel and this makes the HDD to struggle.
I would like a project setting where you can specify the maximum waveform generation tasks that run in parallel.

I made a similar thread back in 2020. I tested the waveform generation speed by dropping clips one by one and by dropping all clips together, the speed difference is huge.
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=125901

I wasn't sure if I did something wrong in my primary install, so as a test on a new installation and in 18.1.3 studio on W11 the problem still exists.

Do note that I'm usually working with hour long videos (As an example https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cwv5bM ... sp=sharing WARNING: Sine wave sound).

To to confirm I'm not doing something unusual, here's how to copy my workflow.
1) download the file
2) copy the file 3 times to get 4 files
3) make new project
4) insert the 4 files into project
5) insert 4 files into a new timeline
6) wait while the first waveform appear
7) wait the same amount of time and go to the next file
8) watch as there is no waveform

I've generally found waveform generation patchy at times, it's better than it used to be, though there's been more than enough occasions where I've had to jump start it by applying a razor edit etc.

Could it not work in the same way as background rendering? You leave the timeline idle for your preferred time and then the waveforms are generated once any rendering is completed?

Please don't confuse people by bringing up rendering. This is strictly an Edit page problem

+1 for sequential track rendering for waveforms. Or at least gives us a background process bar we can see and restart.