Refuses to start rendering, 17.1 beta 9, Mac M1

I have a fairly involved Fusion composition, and wanted to render a few seconds of it to observe the animation. Even with just a few seconds selected, it refused to even start rendering. It gave an error message saying it could not be processed.

Here is a screenshot of the nodes.

Standard_Shapes_of_Project.jpg (232.99 KiB) Viewed 1601 times

As you can see in the above screen shot, there are no indications of any red-colored nodes with errors. Also, in the Fusion timeline, it plays the animations (albeit that it crawls at very slow speed).

I have a Mac Mini M1, 16GB RAM, and people have said that these M1 chips are so efficient that 16GB RAM on the M1 is equivalent to 32GB RAM on a Windows machine.

But this failure to even start rendering a selected few seconds of this Fusion composition, is this a bug in Davinci 17.1 beta 9, or is it the case that the M1 Mac Mini, even with 16GB RAM, simply cannot cope with fairly involved Fusion compositions?

If it is not a bug, I would have expected it to at least start rendering, even if it was slow. But it does not even start rendering.

Log file attached:

DaVinci-Resolve-logs-20210222-023922.zip

(680.7 KiB) Downloaded 54 times

Well, I wouldn't believe in that myth regarding RAM. Yes, the M1 machines are impressive and they can run Resolve pretty well. But Fusion loves RAM, a lot of it! For complex projects, even 64 GB can be tight under Intel.

That said, I was surprised that I can render the "Space Ship" project which you can download from the Fusion product page. I tried out of curiosity with a MB Air M1 with only 8 GB. It is dead slow, but renders, while it crashes on an Intel machine with 32 GB. Go figure!

It's a bug, a big bug in Beta 9. I'd recommend using Beta 8 until Beta 10 is released for 17.1 for the M1 Apple Silicon Macs.

As for RAM capacity, it's difficult to compare it to an Intel Mac. You'll find that you can do far more with an M1 with the lower memory capacities than would be expected, but part of that is due to the incredibly fast onboard SSD storage and the speed which swapping memory to the hard drive occurs. A 16GB M1 should page to the SSD far less than my 8G M1 MacBook Air, so long term longevity is likely higher than compared to my M1 8GB laptop.

This very fast SSD swapping activity, along with the benefits of a RISC (reduced instruction set) ARM based processor in coding efficiency, provides the "illusion" that 16GB is like a 32GB Intel Mac. However the Intel Mac will swap a lot less, which is a good thing as SSD swap is much slower and a larger impact on the Intel Mac experience.

I picked up AppleCare+ so that if the SSD exceeds it's terabytes written (TBW) rating and happens to fail, it'll be Apple's problem to resolve. I've repeatedly posted how amazed I am with the performance of a 4K timeline with 4K 10-Bit 4:2:2 All-I footage, with fusion, titles, color/grading and Noise Reduction. However I've had a lot of problems with Beta 9 not closing (having to force quit) and some other random issues. Rendering when it works is a lot faster due to some improvements, but Beta 8 is much more stable at this point.

At my end even fusion 3d titles are unusable in the resolve as it refuses to processs on my m1 macmini 16gb, where as it renders fine on my 7 years old intel macbook i7 16gb.

At my end even fusion 3d titles are unusable in the resolve as it refuses to processs on my m1 macmini 16gb, where as it renders fine on my 7 years old intel macbook i7 16gb.

Today I found a way to allow the Mac Mini 16GB to render quite efficiently.

In the Edit Page, I waited till the Fusion composition has auto-rendered (i.e. the red lines fully turned to blue). Then, in the render settings, under "Advanced Settings", select 'Use render cached images'.

As a test, I rendered a sample 15 second portion of the Fusion composition.

Using the above method of using render cached images, the 15 second clip took 15 seconds to render.

Whereas, without using render cache, that 15 second clip took 2 minutes 14 seconds to render.

So I think the workaround that I'll use with the M1 is to wait till all the auto-rendering has been done. (I don't know if the time waiting for auto-rendering amounts to the same time as would have taken to render from scratch without caches.)

I don't dabble with Fusion (when I need a comp made I hand it over to an AE or Maya god to create) so I can't comment on it's viability on any platform, but I think there's a simpler and bigger issue at hand here:
That the work is being attempted on a Mac Mini.

I've done a lot of research on the Mini platform; based on white-papers and the published spec it sure seems like it would handle the "big stuff" like professional video editing without a hitch. But real-world testing proved otherwise. The reality is that using a Mini for this kind of work is like asking a sports-car to do the job of a tractor-trailer. Bad fit in all aspects.

The mini is hobbled by a couple things:

- Lack of bandwidth available to the mainboard to CPU/GPU and RAM. A similarly spec'd iMac has far more data-lanes and with bigger pipes than the Mini.
- Thermal limits are hit fast when doing a big render (and the newer units throttle-back resources when they detect CPU-frying temps), and the venting is poor for that environment.
- Limited RAM capacity. (DR really breathes freely with more than 64GB of RAM.) And the price Apple wants for a max'd out RAM MIni is the same as a newly spec'd iMac! C'mon...

Although Apple markets the units as being able to handle editing tasks, they certainly don't flash that it's supposed to handle the ultra-heavy lifting that a Fusion or AE comp requires.

The real point here, is that the Mini is by design a general-consumer device. To expect it to perform high-functioning tasks suited for towers or something powerful like an iMac Pro is simply asking way too much from the hardware design.

Want Resolve to work the way it should? Move to a machine that can actually handle the work.

Sorry, Robert, but we are discussing the M1 mini here.

Quite a few of your points don't apply there, while you are right about the Intel mini. Apart from the RAM, which nobody with a clear mind would buy from Apple

It's a bug, a big bug in Beta 9. I'd recommend using Beta 8 until Beta 10 is released for 17.1 for the M1 Apple Silicon Macs.
...
However I've had a lot of problems with Beta 9 not closing (having to force quit) and some other random issues. Rendering when it works is a lot faster due to some improvements, but Beta 8 is much more stable at this point.

I just picked up a M1 Macbook yesterday (trading in an i9 MacBook with butterfly keyboard that is a lemon in my opinion). So 17.1 b9 is the first non v16 version I've run. It won't quit properly, nor will it render the timeline no matter how many time I delete cache or check to make sure the project path for cache is correct.

So I downgraded to b8 on your recommendation, and I still have the same issues: can't quit cleanly, nor can render cache for video (just a red line above the timeline always). Thoughts?

DaVinci Resolve 17.1 beta 10 solves both the issue I was seeing. It now renders properly and quits cleanly.

I can also confirm that 17.1 beta 10 is significantly better on my own M1 MacBook Air.