Clips Randomly Disappearing from the timeline

Hi,
I have been using Davinci Resolve for a few months, but I noticed after editing some projects that some clips just randomly disappear from the timeline. At first, I thought I was just imagining it or that I was inadvertently hitting a key, but tonight it happened again. I opened a project I was editing last night and found some clips missing. I then checked my timeline against the output render I created the previous evening and found at least five clips had disappeared in random locations.
To my knowledge, this is the third time I have experienced this now. I feel a little embarrassed even asking this, but has anyone else experienced this, or is there a history or log I can check to make sure I am not going crazy?

Regards
Drake.

Hi,
I have been using Davinci Resolve for a few months, but I noticed after editing some projects that some clips just randomly disappear from the timeline. At first, I thought I was just imagining it or that I was inadvertently hitting a key, but tonight it happened again. I opened a project I was editing last night and found some clips missing. I then checked my timeline against the output render I created the previous evening and found at least five clips had disappeared in random locations.
To my knowledge, this is the third time I have experienced this now. I feel a little embarrassed even asking this, but has anyone else experienced this, or is there a history or log I can check to make sure I am not going crazy?

Regards
Drake.

Hey Drake!

I too had this happen recently. I had rendered out a cut and after I restarted the last 5 video clips on Track 1 were gone but their audio files (that were linked) were still there.

I've seen this happen too.

Currently, I'm doing my projects in Premiere until Resolve becomes more stable. Too many show-stopping bugs.

I didn't want to downgrade Resolve because I want to keep playing with the latest versions and it's difficult to get more than one version of Resolve on a computer.

Thanks for your replies guys. At least now I know I am not imagining it. I love Resolve and have been flirting with the idea of buying the full version but I do feel it is not quite at the standard of reliability one would expect from software that one would be potentially committing hours of work to.
It is feature-rich and very flexible but it does seem a little unpredictable at times and I hate the way it often silently refuses to do something without telling you why.

I had it happen again tonight. I was editing a clip and because I am now paranoid about video clips just disappearing I locked the video track whenever I just want to edit audio. I have video and audio recorded together, and I then added a soundtrack. If I do not lock the video track then as I edit the soundtrack video clips just disappear. It always starts with one particular video clip, but it does this silently so you do not notice they are gone until you finish the edit. I then Ctrl Z to recover the video track but that means losing all my audio edits. I do not have the video track selected when I edit the audio and there should be no association between the video and soundtrack, so I am puzzled why the video disappears.
For now, I just continually lock and unlock the video track; it seems to be the only way to prevent video clips from randomly disappearing.
I am glad I did not shell out a few hundred euros for the full version.

This happened to me just a couple days ago: I loaded a timeline I had been working on a few days previously and discovered that all the video files were missing from a section a couple minutes long - clips I had just recently spent a lot of time painstakingly color grading. Needless to say this was extremely worrisome. I export my project daily as a backup and went through my backups to figure out where the clips had gone missing and discovered that they were still present in the backup export from the night before. But I had not done anything to that timeline on the day I found the clips missing, so it wasn't user error. Resolve just randomly deleted a bunch of video clips from a timeline I didn't even have loaded. I'm lucky I had a backup.

Make sure when you're doing edits on just picture or just sound that you have "Linked Selection" turned off and/or that you have all the tracks on the side you're not working on locked. In my case I wasn't even doing anything to the timeline in question, though.

[Peter Chamberlain]

If u have some way to repo this and ideally can share a drp and phone video showing the workflow we can investigate further.

Has anyone discovered a fix for this or away to get the footage back yet? This happened to the team I work with for the first time yesterday and again today. Seems like it happens when the project is opened from a different computer. All of track 1 video just disappeared once we opened the project. We have 4 people on our team and work off a server so we're consistently in and out of collaborative projects. We've been doing this for over a year now and this just randomly started. We've also been working with Resolve for a few years and haven't encountered this problem. Fortunately we had a back up on our project yesterday but today we don't have one and our current solution is to manually put each clip missing from track 1. Any thoughts?

Just before the holidays we experienced the identical behavior on a feature. After a full Save and Quit, upon reopening a few days later, Track 1 was entirely deleted. All the Data and Grades were gone.

Then again today on a different project with seven 90 sec timelines. After a client review and a Save and Quit, the project was reopened on a different workstation (with the same version of Resolve) and all of the data from one of the timelines on Track 1 had been deleted.

Especially worrisome now because even after a full Save and Quit there is no way to know if the project is intact or not.

Reported it up the ladder. In the meantime, no, I wouldn't know of a solution for this one.

Clay

Yes, I have had this bug many times. if you do duplicate timeline, this problem happens every second time. I think the problem is with postgresql. we are working with the project over the network

Was this issue ever resolved? Having the same problem on the latest version of Resolve 17

Hi,

We have now experienced several projects where this problem has occured, the logs does not give us a definite answer but show spontaneous timeouts to the database.

I know we are not the only production house this has happened to.
Do you have any possible solutions we can try?

Hi this post is a little bit old but I found in my case a solution.
I remember that I gave the clip I am missing the wrong Timecode. I wanted to change the timecode of the timeline and instead I changed it on the clip. So the clip seems to be missing. After giving the right time code for current frame all was correct again.

So I worked two days on the project. Savin. Open. Clip not there. Clip is in media pool and on the correct location. Because of the clip atribute I placed the missing clip again on a new track in the timeline with the missing clip. Open again clip atribute and changing the current frame to a wrong timecode. Pressed o.k. and the clip was missing the same as the same clip on the track below. Open again the clip atributes and change it back to the original atributes. And TADAAAAAA. All links and clips are now correct.

Hope this helps
cu R

Hi,

We have now experienced several projects where this problem has occured, the logs does not give us a definite answer but show spontaneous timeouts to the database.

I know we are not the only production house this has happened to.
Do you have any possible solutions we can try?

I wonder if BMD has tried to repro this by simulating timeouts from the db?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I imported a XML timeline from Premiere and for some reason the composite mode for the last 2 clips was set to multiply resulting in a black screen. Just changed it back to normal, and voila, they reappeared.

Oy vay...it is two years later from this initial post and the problem is still occurring.

I was/am literally in the middle of an edit, I walked away from my computer for less than 30 seconds and suddenly totally placed and corrected media disappeared from the timeline, and the media pool...this is the first time it has disappeared from both the timeline (MEDIA OFFLINE) and ALSO the media pool...are there any navigable immediate fixes?

This is so frustrating to get so far in an edit to have your work vanish. This has happened now four times in the past 24 hours.

I thank you for any guidance.

What kind of Library, Cecily? Local, Network, Cloud? Where is it stored? Where is the media stored?

Jim - I think I see where you're going here. If I'm wrong then I apologize in advance for my mistaken assumption. But what I'm expecting - because I've seen it here many times - is "if something strange happens and anything is on removable media then you've found your culprit and can stop investigating." Just tell the user "stop doing that."

There's no reason Resolve should behave as the user is describing regardless of where their media or database is stored. The behavior isn't a crash or total destruction of the session. It's a very specific, systematic change. Even if the disk connection were flaky - which I think is unlikely - this behavior would not be the result. It's inconceivable that a flaky disk connection would cause the same specific behavior multiple times.

Even if there were a flaky connection, there would be disk errors in the system log. So if you really want to go down that route then try to lead them through looking for recent disk errors in the log rather than just pointing at a hardware configuration of which you disapprove and calling it a day. That feedback is quite unhelpful because it either upsets them but they do nothing to change their hardware or they go through lots of work and possibly money changing it but almost certainly don't fix their problem.

I get that you don't like external storage. That's your prerogative. But trying to get people in distress to adopt your preference when there's no evidence that it will fix their problem isn't very kind. Doing some debugging with them that helps discover what's actually going on - that would be kind indeed.

I'm not sure I agree, Joe. What the user is describing sounds like some sort of storage issue. Knowing how the user has setup their database location and media location might give us a clue. For example, I've read posts where users put the db location in a drop-box sync folder so that it will get backed-up but of course this can lead to bizarre behavior and lost data.

If we can identify the storage anomaly, then we might be able to rectify figure failures by applying best practices in an effort to help avoid pitfalls of the current design / implementation.

Maybe I'm missing your point?

No problem asking as long as the result isn't "don't do that" if the answer is "on an external drive" or "on cloud storage."

I've not heard any good reasons why Resolve can't handle having either the media or database on an external drive or cloud storage. I get that BMD prefers we not do this. But I've never heard compelling explanations for why Resolve is uniquely unable to support such a configuration. I know I and many others have used external drives for both media and databases with no apparent ill effects.

If there are intractable issues with Resolve having either media or databases anywhere other than internal drives then I - and many others I suspect - would like to know them. But "just don't do that" or "that's why things aren't working for you" are not acceptable answers - especially when they're not true for many other NLEs.

I've never heard from BMD that media on an external drive is a no-no. That would be absurd. However, the official stance from BMD regarding file-based libraries (databases) is that they should (must?) be located on permanently attached storage (presumably internal). Probably because the file-based library is not fault tolerant for some unfortunate reason.

I've also heard from BMD that using the ExFAT file system is a no-no. This may also apply to media drives (I don't recall).

Let's start by identifying configurations that do not work well with Resolve as it stands and then, as we identify weaknesses, we can lobby for improvements to allow for a broader range of supported configurations.

Someone from BMD can chime in here any time now to clarify this internal/external storage issue.... please?

Jim - I think I see where you're going here.

My inquiry at this stage is to find under what circumstances the reported phenomena occurs. If that can be narrowed down, it could help BMD track the cause.

Great. Sorry if I got my cart ahead of this horse.

Hi,
I have been using Davinci Resolve for a few months, but I noticed after editing some projects that some clips just randomly disappear from the timeline. At first, I thought I was just imagining it or that I was inadvertently hitting a key, but tonight it happened again. I opened a project I was editing last night and found some clips missing. I then checked my timeline against the output render I created the previous evening and found at least five clips had disappeared in random locations.
To my knowledge, this is the third time I have experienced this now. I feel a little embarrassed even asking this, but has anyone else experienced this, or is there a history or log I can check to make sure I am not going crazy?

Regards
Drake.

Here is me! I'm getting this problem in 2023 What was or is the solution for this can anyone tell?

[Peter Chamberlain]

Resolve lists in the media pool the path to the clips.

If when you start Resolve the drive isn't connected, when the media pool process tries to find the clip and can't, it will show offline. Plugging the drive in later doesn't trigger Resolve to look again.

If the drive connection is bad, the OS drops the drive, it changes drive letters, it takes too long to respond to requests .. it will show offline.

If your GPU driver is not correct, so the GPU cant decode the clips correctly, it will show offline.

We will look into making the offline feedback a bit more defined to help you fault find.

Finally, if you put your project library on an ExFat drive, expect it to be an issue. Please don't do that.
If you put your project drive on another type of external drive, you should be really sure it's always connected before starting Resolve. We don't recommend external drives for PL.

Our recommendation is to have the project library on an internal drive.

Thanks for that info Peter.
Yes, any form of FAT is a bad idea at this point as even ExFAT is susceptible to corruption from a power loss or cable being unplugged.

As far as making sure the drive is connected, I’ve always found that if I start Resolve with a drive not present all I have to do is quit, connect the drive, and restart. This has been true and database (project library) drives.

Is there some case - assuming the drive mount point or drive letter is correct - where this wouldn’t fix things?

[Shrinivas Ramani]

Hi Chris

Can you show us an example of your issue? When you say clips have disappeared, is it:
a. Offline or unlinked media (in red)
b. Missing media pool entries or missing edits in the timeline?
c. Missing files on disk?

A screenshot and any logs captured when opening the project/timeline would help. Please also add some context on how the project was created (e.g "the project was imported from Resolve 16" or "the timeline was created in Third Party and imported as an XML file" or "I copied these edits from a 29.97 FPS to a 24 FPS timeline" etc) - as this would allow us to see if there are checks specific to that situation.

Thanks
Shrinivas

It just started happening to me....in18.6.

Clips that appear on the Timeline suddenly stop appearing in the Viewer.

I found, by accident, that turning off the Color/Fusion toggle, which is at the top and on the right of the Viewer, solves the problem!!

If that toggle is on....I don't see the clip. If the toggle is off....voila!!

Color-Fusion Toggle.png (42.95 KiB) Viewed 948 times

I haven't had this happen to me. This is insane, how the fffff is this something that happens in an NLE that has been around for 10 years this is nuts.

[Shrinivas Ramani]

Hi Alan

Is the clip that toggles on/off along with the Preview Colour & Fusion effects a simple media clip? Does it have Fusion effects? Is it in itself a Fusion effect?

It would help if the screenshot showed the type of clip. In general it is also a good idea to include a description of your system, the exact Resolve 18.6 version and type (free, studio) and a quick summary of what you were doing when you observed the issue. The FAQ would help here: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=90190

Thanks
Shrinivas