DaVinci Resolve 19 and macOS Sequoia 15.0 general release

Has anyone experienced problems with the latest general release of DaVinci Resolve that may be attributed to running under macOS Sequoia 15.0 general release today?

I came to the forum this evening looking for the first reports of macOS 15 and Resolve 19 compatibility. I'm curious

Thanks, Steve. I waited months before updating to Sonoma, but Sequoia does have some interesting features so I’d like to upgrade sooner than later.

I am staying far away from Sequoia for as long as I can. I find Apple's Security & Permissions problems to be worrying. I'm like the kid from Time Bandits:



As it was, it took us six months to finally switch everything over to Sonoma, and even that was a huge stinking pile of annoyance.

Thanks for the cautionary tale. I’ll hold off going to Sequoia until we see the coast is clear.

I'm upgrading to Sequoia now. I'll keep you posted with all the surprises I'll be encountering from macOS as well as DR 19.0.1

I updated my MacBook Pro M1 Max to Mac OS 15.0 and running resolve 19.01 I am seeing no issues so far on a UHD project with a mix of NLOG h265, Dji h265 and Nraw footage.

Worked on a drone footage project, MP4 H.265, no issues so far.

Thanks, Morten and Omar. That’s encouraging. I have a current project in process. After I finish that project in a few weeks, assuming Resolve seems to be working well, I should be able to upgrade macOS.

I have upgraded two Mac's, both M1's, one an Ultra, the other a Pro Max. The Pro Max has been good, but the Ultra will not render properly; it stutters the rendered video as if it rendered missing frames. When I take the exact same timeline and media because it is all on an external SSD drive, to my other Mac, it renders flawlessly. So it's an issue with the M1 Ultra; perhaps it's the encoders. Basically, I can't use my all singing and danacing fully maxed out M1 Ultra for Resolve currently.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Jamie, thanks for the feedback. Hope the other thread with this concern leads to a good result. I’m running on Intel and AMD on my Mac Pro 2019 by the way, so your post indicates the success of Resolve 19 running under Sequoia 15.0 may vary depending upon the hardware involved.

I worked on BRAW Q0 24fps + drone footage H.265 59.94fps no issues expect for the reported general bugs across all platforms.

Hey

Though I'm in the Marc team for sure ("I am staying far away from Sequoia for as long as I can."), this topic is highly interesting, thank you all for feeding it.

[but you know, I just upgraded to Sonoma less than 15 days ago ]

Hey

Though I'm in the Marc team for sure ("I am staying far away from Sequoia for as long as I can."), this topic is highly interesting, thank you all for feeding it.

[but you know, I just upgraded to Sonoma less than 15 days ago ]

You should join the adventurous team

...the Ultra will not render properly; it stutters the rendered video as if it rendered missing frames. When I take the exact same timeline and media because it is all on an external SSD drive, to my other Mac, it renders flawlessly. So it's an issue with the M1 Ultra; perhaps it's the encoders. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Below was my reply to your post on the other thread. Two years ago I worked with FCP engineering on a frame order bug that happened on M1 Max and M1 Ultra. I think it also affected Resolve, although the investigation didn't cover that. It happened if certain temporal effects were rendered to cache, and this would sometimes persist to a ProRes output file.

What codec is your source material? What effects are on those? Does the problem persist if exported to a ProRes output file? If you can provide more information, I'll examine it.
---------------

I have the M1 Ultra Mac Studio on Sonoma 14.6.1 and (like your case) Resolve Studio 19.01 works fine on that. I have not upgraded to Sequoia yet.

If you think it's the encoders, try View>Bypass Color & Fusion>Bypass All Grades and see if it exports slowly. That disables the GPU-intensive effects, which enables isolated examination of possible encoding perf. issues.

Also, there are separate encoders for ProRes vs H.264/H.265. As a test try exporting in ProRes 422 and see how that works.

When you say it "stutters", do you mean the exported file when played in Quicktime stutters? There was a similar problem a couple of years ago that affected both FCP and Resolve that was unique to M1 Max and M1 Ultra. If the exported video stutters on playback, use the JKL keys in Quicktime Player to go back and forth on that area to see if it is persistently the same frames.

Just updated to Sequoia and things seem to work as before. My source is h264 and h265 from GH5S and GH6 Vlog for both. Resolve seems to now load very fast though. Don't see any difference that is noticeable in editing or rendering.

So far no issues other than the DR version 19 problems I was already experiencing.

I did have to reenter my DR serial number which had me wondering if I have not lost one of the two licenses.

Hi Everyone, I have managed to narrow down my render issue to the following:

Only happens on M1 Ultra when I select Multi-Pass Encoding with QUICKTIME Main 10. If I switch off the Multi-Pass Encoding or leave it on but use MP4, it encodes.

...the Ultra will not render properly; it stutters the rendered video as if it rendered missing frames. When I take the exact same timeline and media because it is all on an external SSD drive, to my other Mac, it renders flawlessly. So it's an issue with the M1 Ultra; perhaps it's the encoders. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Below was my reply to your post on the other thread. Two years ago I worked with FCP engineering on a frame order bug that happened on M1 Max and M1 Ultra. I think it also affected Resolve, although the investigation didn't cover that. It happened if certain temporal effects were rendered to cache, and this would sometimes persist to a ProRes output file.

What codec is your source material? What effects are on those? Does the problem persist if exported to a ProRes output file? If you can provide more information, I'll examine it.
---------------

I have the M1 Ultra Mac Studio on Sonoma 14.6.1 and (like your case) Resolve Studio 19.01 works fine on that. I have not upgraded to Sequoia yet.

If you think it's the encoders, try View>Bypass Color & Fusion>Bypass All Grades and see if it exports slowly. That disables the GPU-intensive effects, which enables isolated examination of possible encoding perf. issues.

Also, there are separate encoders for ProRes vs H.264/H.265. As a test try exporting in ProRes 422 and see how that works.

When you say it "stutters", do you mean the exported file when played in Quicktime stutters? There was a similar problem a couple of years ago that affected both FCP and Resolve that was unique to M1 Max and M1 Ultra. If the exported video stutters on playback, use the JKL keys in Quicktime Player to go back and forth on that area to see if it is persistently the same frames.

It works flawlessly if I render to PRORES, so I think you might be right.ot going on, and my cache and proxy are set to P I also have a lroRes, so what you explain may also apply to that element. My Current workaround is an MP4 export or not using Multi-Encode Pass.

Apologies, my previous response was slightly incorrect; it still doesn't work even if you export using MP4 when you have multipass encode ticked.

Hello Jamie! I’m also seeing this strange stuttery file on export on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio, with multi-pass enabled. Started happening right after the update to Sequoia, because of course.

I was able to get the output file to work normally in my first test by disabling hardware acceleration for the encode to HEVC H.265, 4:2:2 10bit for HDR.

On the second test, keeping hardware acceleration enabled works so long as Multi-Pass is disabled.

When you say "it stutters the rendered video as if it rendered missing frames", do you mean the exported H.264/H.265 file plays roughly as if frames are missing? Can you elaborate on the behavior?

… it still doesn't work even if you export using MP4 when you have multipass encode ticked.

Oh! I always use multipass so that’s a showstopper for me upgrading to Sequoia 15.0. Appreciate your efforts on this testing, Jamie.

When you say "it stutters the rendered video as if it rendered missing frames", do you mean the exported H.264/H.265 file plays roughly as if frames are missing? Can you elaborate on the behavior?

Yes, its chunks missing and is not fluid.

For both OS and Resolve, I usually wait at least 3 months following GA to let things settle down. So doing the same with Sequoia and Resolve 19.01. I don’t see anything that’s stopping me, project wise, to stay on Sonoma and Resolve 18.6.6.

I installed Sequoia and DVR 19.01 on a Macbook Pro M1 Max.

I haven't tested on a project yet as I ran into the missing license activation issue. After only one attempt it was activated but I decided to stop there.

After reading about issues with the Mac Studio Ultra I'll wait for BMD to road test Sequoia.

Hi Everyone, I have managed to narrow down my render issue to the following:

Only happens on M1 Ultra when I select Multi-Pass Encoding with QUICKTIME Main 10. If I switch off the Multi-Pass Encoding or leave it on but use MP4, it encodes.

Sadly, that has made no difference on my M2 pro, although it was worth a try. I have a 20minute 4k project that finally exported after 17hrs last night.

Apologies, my previous response was slightly incorrect; it still doesn't work even if you export using MP4 when you have multipass encode ticked.

Is this just for your Ultra or does this also happen with your MacBook M1 Max systems?

Is this just for your Ultra or does this also happen with your MacBook M1 Max systems?

I have both machines and will try to test this today. It would help if I knew what input codec, effects and timeline layout he used. I will have to make some guesses and do trial-and-error iterations.

I have both machines and will try to test this today.

Sorry to pop-up this way but say "one" exports in PR 422HQ anyway (meaning that even if a MP4 is to be made afterwards, it is in another piece of app like Handbrake), I read that it the export is always ok on any machine, right ?

So in case of Resolve v19.1 + Sequoia, what about Fusion ? the TL playback ? the GUI response ? else ?

Thx in advance

… it still doesn't work even if you export using MP4 when you have multipass encode ticked.

Oh! I always use multipass so that’s a showstopper for me upgrading to Sequoia 15.0. Appreciate your efforts on this testing, Jamie.

Why though? Are you delivering to optical discs/usb sticks? The only time multipass is really useful is when you need to hit an exact file size. Otherwise the better choice is single pass with constant quality, although sadly Resolve on macOS gives hardly any control over parameters like that. On Windows with recent Intel or Nvidia hardware you can get really nice H.264/H.265 renders out of Resolve now. Not sure if Apple or BMD is the bottleneck here, probably the Apple API.

...say "one" exports in PR 422HQ anyway (meaning that even if a MP4 is to be made afterwards, it is in another piece of app like Handbrake), I read that it the export is always ok on any machine, right ?

So in case of Resolve v19.1 + Sequoia, what about Fusion ? the TL playback ? the GUI response ? else ?

I've only seen the one report from Jamie Coats saying Sequoia 15.0 and Resolve Studio 19.01 on M1 Ultra produces dropped frames when exporting to multi-pass H.264. Even though that's a specific software/hardware/encoding scenario, I think more people would have seen that if it was a general issue.

I've done some tests today with Sequoia, DR 19.01 on M1 Ultra, and so far I don't see that problem.

He may have a conflicting third-party plugin, a specific effect, a specific input codec or some other item which narrows the scenario. So far I haven't discovered it, but I'm just shooting in the dark. It would be helpful if he could supply more info.

I also haven't seen any issue so far with TL playback or GUI response. I haven't tested Fusion.

Oh! I always use multipass so that’s a showstopper for me upgrading to Sequoia 15.0...

Why though? Are you delivering to optical discs/usb sticks? The only time multipass is really useful is when you need to hit an exact file size. Otherwise the better choice is single pass with constant quality...

This was briefly debated in the thread below seven years ago! So I assumed multi pass was improving the quality, but based on your comments, I’ll revert to using single pass which saves significant time on the renders. My renders all go to Vimeo so file size is not an issue anymore. Thanks, Roger.

H.264 Multi Pass Encoding... WHERE IS IT?
https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/topic? ... source=app

Updated to MacOS 15 today and don't encounter any issues in DR. Works without problem on my side!

....

Thank you BTW...

...say "one" exports in PR 422HQ anyway (meaning that even if a MP4 is to be made afterwards, it is in another piece of app like Handbrake), I read that it the export is always ok on any machine, right ?

So in case of Resolve v19.1 + Sequoia, what about Fusion ? the TL playback ? the GUI response ? else ?

I've only seen the one report from Jamie Coats saying Sequoia 15.0 and Resolve Studio 19.01 on M1 Ultra produces dropped frames when exporting to multi-pass H.264. Even though that's a specific software/hardware/encoding scenario, I think more people would have seen that if it was a general issue.

I've done some tests today with Sequoia, DR 19.01 on M1 Ultra, and so far I don't see that problem.

He may have a conflicting third-party plugin, a specific effect, a specific input codec or some other item which narrows the scenario. So far I haven't discovered it, but I'm just shooting in the dark. It would be helpful if he could supply more info.

I also haven't seen any issue so far with TL playback or GUI response. I haven't tested Fusion.

Actually, my issue is H.265, I never uses H.264 so do not know if the issue is with that codec.

I have senet BM my project and exported renders to review so watch this space.

..Actually, my issue is H.265, I never uses H.264 so do not know if the issue is with that codec. I have sent BM my project and exported renders to review so watch this space.

Are you using Neat Video? If so, your problem might be the one described in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=208737

I think I have the same issue as Jamie Coats. Since I upgraded to Sequoia I have problems with renders about having missing frames, although I can see it even in the imported files, in the media panel and the timeline, some files show the "File not found" warning, but when I play those files they reproduce correctly, it is only at the time of rendering when its messing up my workflow, sincerely Im out of ideas of how can I fix this.

I have an M1 Macbook from 2020 and I use m.2 external SSD to edit. But I think the problem is macOS software and I can't return to the previous update, Im pretty new in Mac and didn't know that...

I installed Sequoia and DVR 19.01 on a Macbook Pro M1 Max.

I haven't tested on a project yet as I ran into the missing license activation issue. After only one attempt it was activated but I decided to stop there.

After reading about issues with the Mac Studio Ultra I'll wait for BMD to road test Sequoia.

Caution Guys! I have the very same problem after updating to Sequoia. I had to because some of my apps stopped working (they required the update) and since then Resolve is almost(!) every time I start it, asking for my activation key. I usually had to enter it, restart Resolve and enter it again for it to work, with the very uncanny result that now my activation code is blocked due to "maximum automatic deactivations per week exceeded". This will last at least for 7 day (according to a different post here). Until then I can't open resolve at all and am unable to work... I'm still working on a fix but I guess I should let you know that this could happen.

(Mac Pro M2, 2022)

I’m having problems when using Fusion. I tried to downgrade to Sonoma but it requires formatting the main HD so I cancelled it. I’ll stick to Sequoia and bite the dust until BM support team check my open ticket.

I'm currently having the same issue. I've been on Resolve 18.6 during a documentary project and just wrapped the project on September 22. Then I updated my macOS to v15. Was pleasantly surprised when it kept asking for my activation key. I didn't know there was a limit and now I'm locked out for a full 7 days. I contacted support but it's the weekend. They'll want me to upgrade to Resolve 19 but I don't want to just yet as the documentary project just asked for some changes. Not sure what to do here. This sucks.

I’m still on Sonoma macOS 14, but I had no issue going from DaVinci Resolve 18.6 to 19 on the same unfinished project. Upgraded to 19.02 today and seems fine.

I’m on Mac Pro 2019 Intel 16 core 48GB RAM and AMD Vegas Pro II 32GB GPU. Beginning to feel the ‘old’ hardware is behaving better than the Apple Mx chips. Hope my hardware lasts another 5 years but at some point Apple will declare me obsolete in their infinite wisdom.

I’m still on Sonoma macOS 14, but I had no issue going from DaVinci Resolve 18.6 to 19 on the same unfinished project. Upgraded to 19.02 today and seems fine.

I’m on Mac Pro 2019 Intel 16 core 48GB RAM and AMD Vegas Pro II 32GB GPU. Beginning to feel the ‘old’ hardware is behaving better than the Apple Mx chips. Hope my hardware lasts another 5 years but at some point Apple will declare me obsolete in their infinite wisdom.

That’s good to know Rick. As soon as this last project is in the can, I will upgrade to 19.02 but on Sonoma, not Sequoia.

As for the older hardware, that’s my feeling too.

I installed Sequoia and DVR 19.01 on a Macbook Pro M1 Max.

I haven't tested on a project yet as I ran into the missing license activation issue. After only one attempt it was activated but I decided to stop there.

After reading about issues with the Mac Studio Ultra I'll wait for BMD to road test Sequoia.

Caution Guys! I have the very same problem after updating to Sequoia. I had to because some of my apps stopped working (they required the update) and since then Resolve is almost(!) every time I start it, asking for my activation key. I usually had to enter it, restart Resolve and enter it again for it to work, with the very uncanny result that now my activation code is blocked due to "maximum automatic deactivations per week exceeded". This will last at least for 7 day (according to a different post here). Until then I can't open resolve at all and am unable to work... I'm still working on a fix but I guess I should let you know that this could happen.

(Mac Pro M2, 2022)

Same issue here, asking activation after macOS update......

BMD says they submitted a request to lift the 7 day lockout but no guarantees.

So that activation issue wasn't fixed for all of you with 19.0.2?

I just got out of my 7 day lockout. I upgraded from 18.6.6 to 19.0.2 last night. I launched the application using my studio license and success. This morning when I turned on my computer and relaunched the Resolve it asked me for my license again. What the heck? This isn't right and BMD support doesn't seem to be helping me. I just reached out to them again. My guess is that they're going to come up with some excuse.

Which version of Sequoia?
While I’m still happily using Sonoma, there are some reports of a fix in the latest update.

macOS 15.0.1

So here's what seems to be the bug. When I'm on home network (wifi) where I first opened my new Resolve 19.0.2 and entered by studio license key yesterday it work. When I went to Starbucks this afternoon and launched 19.0.2 it asked for the studio license again. This time I came here to complain about it and I messaged BMD support which started asking me if I'm on different network. I didn't enter my license while at Starbuck and waited till I got home. Once home I opened 19.0.2 and boom, it works w/o being prompted to enter my key.

This seems to be the bug with macOS 15.0.1 and Resolve 19.0.2

This isn't necessarily fun. I'm confined to only working from home.

Maurice, I believe the the key is associated with the machine id and a network IP. So when Resolve Studio starts, it will check the key + machine id + IP address. If that all checks out then you’re good to go. If you’re at a Starbucks, the IP address will be different so although the key + machine id + IP address won’t match. That’s why you were seeing it work at home because that was where you registered it and not while you’re at Starbucks. That makes logical sense to me. It’s not a bug. If it is a bug, then even when you’re at home it will keep on asking you for the key - unless you have previously registered Resolve Studio from a different network location and might just have forgotten it.

Also, if you’re not sure how it was registered, deactivate the key on that Resolve Studio and then activate it again.