Media Offline / phantom offline

I’ve encountered a serious issue in DaVinci Resolve that could easily cause panic or even workflow halts during professional editing sessions.

Occasionally, clips on the timeline appear as “Media Offline”, even though:
• The media is present and plays perfectly in the source viewer
• It is not flagged as offline in the Media Pool
• It is fully online and properly linked

The issue appears to be related to corrupted timeline render cache, not actual missing media. The only fix seems to be:
• Playback > Delete Render Cache > All
• Then toggling Render Cache from Smart > None > Smart again

While this workaround restores the media display, the initial “offline” warning is extremely misleading — especially in a high-stakes, client-present environment. It creates the impression of lost media, adds stress, and shakes confidence in the platform.

I strongly recommend:
• A fix for the false offline display caused by bad render cache
• Or at least an informative tooltip or warning indicating that this is a render issue — not an offline media problem

This bug makes Resolve appear unstable to clients and team members, and is not acceptable in professional environments.

Thank you for considering this fix in an upcoming release.

Yes, Resolve has had these unacceptable Cache related issues for YEARS, release after release.....

What version on Resolve do you use?

Does this issue happen with Resolve 20 beta 1?

Absolutely yes, I finally convinced myself to switch to the davinci now with version 20.... this issue still seems to be there.....

If you're running into Media Offline problems, check these things:

1) are the drives listed correctly in User -> System -> Media Storage?

2) are there any potential filename conflicts with the source media?

3) be aware that almost all H.264 files do not have accurate embedded timecode, so that can be a potential issue (particularly combined with #2)

4) make sure the drive read/write permissions are set correctly

5) on Mac OS, I would strongly urge you to avoid exFAT, which has problems with Sonoma & Sequoia (strictly my opinion). We generally see better performance with HFS+ (for spinning drives) or APFS (SSDs).

6) check the file path on the Media Page for the missing files and see if you can force a relink. Highlight the files, right-click, choose RELINK MEDIA, and then choose the correct source folder.

7) if the files are H.264/H.265 10-bit, be aware that they will only play in Resolve Studio. (There's quite a few codecs that only play in the Studio version.) For a lot of reasons, highly-compressed H.264/H.265 files are not ideal for post. We generally transcode everything to a better format like ProRes 422 or DNxHR SQX, embed better timecode, and give all the files unique names.

8 ) it's possible only your render cache has gone offline. To ward against that, re-render the cache or just delete it all and then go to the deliver page and try again.

The key is to check the MEDIA PAGE. Look at the rows of media and check where the source drive is. Worst case, relink it all. We try to confine all the media for one project to one folder, so worst case, we'd lasso all the media files, right-click and choose RELINK, and choose that one folder. "In theory," it should just work. Sometimes, just closing the session and re-opening it forces Resolve to go out and check the drive and file paths, and then the session is fine again. And as always, make sure you have enough available space on all connected drives.

Finally: on a Mac, check to make sure you have the latest Pro Video Formats update:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/106396

Marc- aren’t you aware that media offline very often has nothing to do with media being offline? Please update your list of things to check so that it’s up to date with what’s usually going on. Otherwise it’s like a tech support gauntlet of:

Power cycle the machine
Clear the cache
Reset internet settings
Delete and reinstall the app
Reinstall the OS

None of which debugs the user’s problem but may fix it by blowing away all the state of the machine.