5 Methods to Fix Slow Playback in DaVinci Resolve 16 - On ANY Computer

if you're currently editing in davinci resolve 16 and experiencing slow laggy unsmooth playback then believe me i know exactly just how frustrating that can be especially when you're working to a deadline and it just completely disrupts your editing flow so in this video i'm going to go through my top five features which are built into davinci resolve in order to help speed up that process so you get smooth playback all the time so just before we get started guys my name is alex cameron i am a davinci resolve certified trainer and we're delivering all sorts of different videos like this on the channel all the time so if you do get a second just hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on other videos that are coming up in the near future and it's great to have you here as part of our community on this channel so thank you so much indeed if you do hit that button for me now let's look at davinci resolve so here we are we have a particular project and i'm in the edit page this particular project is being shot in a mixture of different resolutions we've actually got some raw clips here from a drone uh which was shot in cinema dng we also have some shots from h.264 cameras and so forth and it's been great it's been edited and actually this whole thing is helpful to show us the sort of playback issues we could possibly come across now i am working on a slightly higher spec machine so just be aware my results might not be the same exactly for you if you're working on a smaller machine you might not be able to get native playback straight away if i hit playback for the most part i get playback right away you do see i occasionally run into some issues here especially in fact there's a lot of noise reduction on this particular clip so you can see up here if we pay our attention to our gpu status indicator and our frames per second you can see the type of performance we're getting now at the moment i'm getting full playback which is absolutely fine but it might be that yours is red and a number that's less than your current frames per second for your timeline and if that's the case then i feel you let's get into some of these tips so the first thing that you can try that's built into davinci resolve is the proxy mode first of all it's very easy to get to just come up to playback come down to proxy mode come across and choose your proxy resolution so you can go to half resolution you can go to quarter resolution so let's just change it straight away to quarter resolution for example and play back and let me just do that little sequence again and hit playback so i have now managed to successfully get a reasonable gpu and frames per second playback no problem at all having just dropped my resolution to quarter the great thing about this is it is just a proxy mode and whether you're in proxy mode or not this is just a playback setting so regardless if i forget to turn that off and i go to deliver do not worry davinci resolve is not going to render out a lower quality version it's going to render out the correct version this is purely a playback setting so that's one of the first things i would try because it's the very fastest thing that you can do to to make a difference to your to your playback so the next thing i'd like to draw your attention to is to the render cache this is another thing that you can do it's just again in playback you come down to render cache come down to one of these other options other than none smart or user for most people using davinci resolve unless you know exactly why you want to be on a user setting i would select smart and event essentially what davinci resolve is going to do is it's going to look at everything that in the timeline that it thinks it needs to render these are typically things like noise reduction certain color effects certain fusion effects transitions certain things like that anything that it feels that it needs to render it will render and it's doing that as we can see now so i've got a little red bar above my timeline and so slowly it is going blue as it renders and the nice thing is one i have got it rendered i should be able to play that back no problem at all getting full playback nice and smooth now i appreciate that's not always ideal because you are having to wait for things to render and also the render cache quality will depend on on how how nice this experience is for you as well so let's go down to project settings once in project settings we'll grab the project settings window and we'll come across the master settings and we'll come down to optimize media and render cache i'm going to come back to optimize media later so that's a little spoiler so let's stay tuned for that one but render cache format is here and we can select our render cache format in a number of different formats i'm on a mac so i have access to prores as well but dnx hr lb or you've got the prores l422lt if you want to render to a cache that's slightly lower quality that's absolutely fine there's no nothing wrong with something like prores 422 lt for your render cache i happen to be rendering to 42hq just because i prefer that and actually if i wanted to i could use my cache media to help speed up my delivery later on so that's a little pro tip if you actually have your render cache go to a format that you'd be quite happy to deliver in then you can actually use your higher res render cache to render out and that speeds up your delivery later on worth knowing that where the the working folders that are listed below here show the render cache and where it's going so the cache file location is essentially where these renders are going to be stored so do make sure that you're storing it somewhere that makes sense it will very quickly fill up your main drive if you're not very careful so i recommend having your render stored on a separate drive ideally if you have plenty of space on a fast internal ssd then then there's nothing wrong with them going there either i i personally think that's fine but again it's just really a case of making sure you don't end up running out of space that's that's my main concern really here so i would make sure that you've got that stored somewhere sensible and then once obviously you've got a render going it will be a little bit better playback no problem at all so that's the second thing that you can try third thing that you can also try is optimized media now that's a really good option too and it's very easy again to do inside of davinci resolve so first of all i'm just going to come down to my project settings again and i'm going to come back to my master settings and come down to the optimized media and render cache box now when i'm down here you'll see you've got two optimized media options the resolution and the format so you can and by default it's actually set to choose automatically and if you allowed davinci resolve to choose automatically what it will do is it will look at the timeline resolution and it will optimize your media based on the timeline resolution so things that are higher than the timeline resolution it will render to an optimized media format anything that's lower than the timeline resolution it will not touch so this is important to note because if you have footage that's maybe you know just an awkward compressed format like h.264 but it's shot at the same resolution as the timeline davinci resolve won't actually optimize that media if you allow it to choose automatically so i would normally recommend picking your media resolution so if you are shooting in 4k then shooting obviously by half you'll be going to 1080 if you go to quarter you'll be going to 720 and so on now i've used quarter and half before absolutely no problem at all my normal default is to half because i tend to shoot in 4k and 1080p works fine enough in my computer so that's absolutely fine so i get a half optimized media format again it's a question of choice really i've gone to pros 42 hq just because i've actually then normally will use 42hq to do the grade as well i've got no problem grading 42hq for the most part especially if i'm on a 8-bit codec it's no problem at all but if you wanted you could make that optimized media format 422 lt or pro even a proxy mode something really light because that's going to actually save on storage space rather than go for something a high-res version like hq or even 4444 so i would tend to go for something that is suitable for your workflow at the time so whether you feel like you don't want to optimize twice or you're just really worried about editing not grading then i would choose that dependent on on what your workflow suits again you've got dnxhd you've got cineform options as well so you can choose your media resolution your media format there and once you've done that again bear in mind that the optimized media gets stored at the cache files location now what you'll actually find is it will create a folder that you can go and find called optimize media and it's stored with your project in your davinci resolve wherever you set this cache file location to be and you can easily sort of skim through look at the info file and then work out what that ultimate media relates to and simply delete that folder if you want to but it's important to know that again you're not going to do any harm but you will have to re-optimize your media when you come back to your project file to generate optimized media it's really very easy and i've got a whole bunch of clips on here some of them are optimized and some of them are not well first of all how do i know if i have got optimized media or not well it's very easy to come up here if you're in the thumbnail view already in your media pool find your media folder where you've got some media change it into the list view and then on the header right click and come down to optimize media and turn it on now you've got a optimized media column that you can just simply rearrange and make it a bit more easy to see and you can see that i've got a bunch of clips here that i've got no optimize media and i've got a couple that are half res and a few more that are not and so on and so forth and i can actually sort that and work out which ones are half red and which ones are not so now if i want to i can get this particular clip here and let me see which one that is by clicking jumping back over so this particular shot we've got here i can right click it and hit generate optimize media and i simply hit that and davinci resolve will run off and it will generate that media for me and it does take a little while and unfortunately it's not something that happens in the background so it is something that i would recommend you do over the night or whether you're having your lunch or something like that and again you can also do a number of clips all at once you can do a whole bin at once if you want to as well it's no problem at all but it's important just to note that it does take that time and it is something that is a foreground process so if i wanted to for example i could just find all of my non-optimized medias simply come down shift to select them all and then generate the optimized media for all of those i'm not going to do that at this point because it would take a bit too long but you've got the idea that you can generate media like that create your optimized media like that no problem at all now if if in a situation you've opened a project that you know you have optimized media for but unfortunately it's not playing back correctly and it doesn't seem to be working correctly and when you go to the list view you can see that you've got none next to it what you can actually do is you can just simply right click come down and rediscover optimized media and davinci resolve will go off and it will look for any optimized media allocated to that project file and reattach it if need be and the other thing we just need to mention about optimized media is that in the playback menu if you come up to the playback menu you'll see two options here use optimized media if available and delete optimized media now what we want to ensure is that use automation media if available is ticked and you'll see now that it has a check next to it meaning that it is ticked meaning that davinci resolve will use the optimized media if it is available to me if it isn't available it will just simply do its normal playback if i want to stop using optimized media i can simply turn that off and then none of this optimized media is going to get referenced in the playback when i hit spacebar so for most part i'd leave that on if you want to delete the optimized media because it is a little bit easier to find the optimized media and delete it by just simply deleting it here then going to the folder structure and deleting it manually it takes a little bit longer so i would just simply go into the project delete the optimized media and then delete the optimized media for the project i'm not going to do that on this occasion but that's my tip number three is using optimized media and my fourth recommendation for speeding up your davinci resolve performance is looking at your timeline resolution now what you'll have noticed is that we have this timeline that's playing back and occasionally it gets a little bit stuttery at times because we've got lots of effects and things going on and it does take a little bit of time sometimes to just get going so one of the things that you can do is actually look at your timeline resolutions now this if i come down to my project settings and look at the master settings you can see that the timeline format for my project is 4k so it's 3840x2160 25 frames per second okay and i'm just going to show you as well that in my timeline that i'm currently in if i right click it timeline timeline settings you can see that we've got a 4k timeline here okay so what you can do in davinci resolve is simply change your timeline to a different resolution so if you change your timeline resolution make sure your video monitoring matches that and hit save then what you'll see is this timeline resolution has been updated to 1920 1080 and now when i play back obviously everything's had to recache because i have my smart caching on at the moment still let me turn that off but you'll see now that also we're playing back but we're playing back now at 1920 1080. so that is another thing that you can do to speed up your playback and it does actually make a dramatic difference but the great thing is that davinci resolve is resolution independent which means that changing timeline resolution like this isn't actually going to affect anything so in this case we've got this particular title and everything sort of set up and it's 1920 by 1080 we've got a color solid underneath it and when i change this back when i'm ready to export to my 4k and hit save everything just rescales and matches up perfectly because i'm working in a 16x9 aspect so the beauty with that is that now if you look again in my settings i'm in a 38 40 by 2160 timeline so so i think it's a really nice tip and often one that's overlooked is actually just changing your timeline resolution can make such a huge dramatic impact to the power at which you play back i often work on a laptop and i will drop my resolution quite dramatically when i'm editing just to get that nice speed and then obviously when it comes to exporting it i'll just make sure that i have changed my timeline back and i'm exporting at the resolution i would like to be doing so so that's my tip number four but tip number five well it's actually the fact that all of these can be used in conjunction with one another so the great thing is you don't have to have one or the other you can drop your resolution of your timeline you can put on proxy mode you can encourage the smart render cache and you can have optimized media and you can do all those things at once and when they all come together to work seamlessly you get that's nice smooth playback that you've been after all along so there we are those are my top five recommendations for how to get smooth playback in davinci resolve 16 if you're struggling on a laptop or desktop that's particularly slow if that was useful to you do let me know in the comments below which particular tip you found useful and how it's managed to help you i'd love to know exactly what your experience was and i do read all the comments so please leave me one and i'd love to read it otherwise guys hit the like button as you're headed out just because i would really appreciate knowing if this was a good video and if you do hit the like button then let me know and i can make more content the same if you didn't like it hit a dislike i don't mind because it just tells me that i need to improve what i'm doing so do let me know and i'll try my best to make sure we get nice content out for you the very next video other than that i'll leave you to your day thanks ever so much for watching and i will see you in the very next video bye for now [Music]

Channel: Alex Cameron - Depiqd

Views: 77,855

Keywords: Fix Slow Playback in DaVinci Resolve 16, fix slow playback on any computer, davinci resolve 16 slow playback, laggy playback davinci resolve, smooth playback in davinci resolve 16, smooth playback in davinci resolve, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve 16 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve optimized media, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 16, editing in davinci resolve, Davinci resolve tutorial video editing, Davinci resolve

Id: 4G9l2oXdR2c

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020