Playback Discrepancies Between Color and Edit Pages

Hi,

I'm running Resolve 17.1.1 on a new M1 MacBook Pro 16GB and have been disappointed with the playback performance of 6K BRAW footage from the get go. As I'm approaching the end of my 14 day return period for the MacBook I decided to carry out some tests, comparing the timeline playback with that of a Youtuber who carried out some tests using 6K BRAW. Using the same footage and project settings (6K footage on a 4K timeline resolution, 1080 video format) I'm getting considerably choppier playback. One thing I have noticed however is that the footage is comparably smooth to that on the Youtuber's video if I playback the footage on the Color page rather than the Edit page.

This has got me pondering whether the issue may be with Resolve rather than the hardware. The displayed FPS on the Edit page remains for a large part at 24 when in actual fact I'm getting several seconds stuck on one frame. On the Color page it hovers around 20FPS which to my eyes seems about right.

Is there an obvious reason why the playback differs greatly between the two pages?

I'm aware of all of the measure I can take to improve playback performance but as I'm getting comparably poorer performance to what has been illustrated elsewhere I'm concerned there's an issue with the hardware.

Anyone? Can’t find information anywhere to suggest why playback performs differently depending on page.

[Peter Chamberlain]

The edit page by default drops video frame if need be to keep playback at timeline rate so the audio is good. You can change this behavior from the timeline viewer three dot menu, select to show all video frames.

The color page shows all video frame, and thus is the real playback rate of your system.

If playback is slower than real time on any system, there are various ways to mitigate that, not the least is reducing the timeline res to HD while editing and grading and then putting it back to your deliver res for rendering.

The current M1 models are entry-level machines and I doubt that anyone is getting reliable playback of 6K RAW in a 4K or UHD timeline. Definitely not if you add more than very basic grading. But they work quite well with a HD timeline, as Peter suggested.
For final rendering you can up the resolution again.

That said, I can get smooth playback with 4.6K BRAW in an UHD timeline. What storage media are you using?

Thanks both. I’m running a Samsung T5. My setup is identical to the user in this video

but the performance is no where near what he is experiencing. I know I can adjust my workflow to aid better playback but i feel that the performance I’m getting isn’t compatible to the myriad M1 test videos I watched before pulling the trigger.

The edit page by default drops video frame if need be to keep playback at timeline rate so the audio is good. You can change this behavior from the timeline viewer three dot menu, select to show all video frames.

The color page shows all video frame, and thus is the real playback rate of your system.

If playback is slower than real time on any system, there are various ways to mitigate that, not the least is reducing the timeline res to HD while editing and grading and then putting it back to your deliver res for rendering.

What does "Show All Video Frames" actually mean for audio? Ideally I'd assume it resamples similar to what ReClock did a decade ago on Windows or drop and repeat some samples to keep pace with video. But from the distortion many report it seems to skip/repeat larger segments of audio? Could you explain what the implementation is like?

Also any chance we could get show all video frames for the cut page as well? Thanks.