How to Use Render Cache and Optimized Media | DaVinci Resolve

foreign [Music] back high resolution footage on your computer is tough especially for older computers and the resolutions just keep getting higher but even working with 4K footage from the pocket Cinema Camera sometimes my computer will Hiccup playing back raw codecs adding color grading any effects things like that just makes it worse the good news is resolve has some ways to tackle this if you look at here's a rough analogy of what's going on when you play back let's say just raw footage Blackmagic design Raw it's a great codec but it still requires some work from your computer to play back and it's like your computer's processing complicated calculus problems right you hit play on your timeline it hits the first clip and it's got all this math to do that's not exact but you get it well when we do different things like render cache optimize media and proxy files it's like we're performing the calculations or at least some of them ahead of time so when you hit play on your timeline your computer looks at the first clip and the answers are already there so it just has to play it and so that can make playing back high resolution footage on older computers very doable and this isn't an exact analogy for every function that we're going to look at but that'll just give you an idea so again we're going to look at render cache which that really applies to optimized media and then in the next in a lesson or two we'll talk about proxy files so let's get to it rendering is really easy to turn on we've looked at the settings briefly in your project settings but let's go back in there really fast just click the gear icon here in the lower right and then on Master settings scroll down to optimize media and render cache and we're looking at render cache format first so I told you if you're on Mac set this to prorose422lt or prorose422 and if you're on Windows some flavor of DNX lb or sq and then you want to have a check here enable background caching after two seconds basically what's going on is if you're not playing the timeline or editing or during doing certain functions and resolve for a period of two seconds then it's going to start caching and then down in the working folders cache files location is where the answer is if you will to all the mathematics are kept so remember don't store this on your local Computer Drive you want this on an external drive wherever you're keeping your movie or ideally if you have a separate SSD drive like for example I have a two terabyte SSD drive that I have as a backup for my pocket Cinema Camera well it's really fast so if you have a thunderbolt connected SSD drive you can set your cache stuff to go there and just create a resolve folder remember resolve will create the cache clip part of that so once you've set these things click save unless you didn't change anything just cancel out and then up on the top go to playback render cash smart and that's going to tell resolve to render what it thinks it needs to render for smooth playback in fact let me turn mine off really fast if I set To None okay here's my timeline it's going to play the raw footage my computer's playing it fine but if it wasn't I could go to playback render cash smart and you're going to see a blue line appear here now that's because I've already rendered all of this if it wasn't rendered this line would be red so for example let me make an edit a blade tool that delete that part and then bring this back and see that red that's not rendered yet but there we go now it's rendered so that's how you tell if it's rendered and ready to go and so this makes sense if we go to finder I'm going to go to my external drive and go to resolve cache and there it is Cash clip and here's the render files see their cryptic dvcc files okay and here's the good news you can toast this folder and delete all those files and nothing bad will happen so I'm going to drive out to trash now if I go back here I see look media offline because it's trying to read the cache files resolve things are still there but I deleted them so what can you do I'm just going to highlight my Clips to go to playback delete render cache selected clips now that's going to tell it to re-render them so there we go the render is done if I go back to finder look the cash clip folder is back cool and if I play this now that error message is gone in my timeline viewer if you want to see how much space your cache files are taking up you can of course go to finder and just get info on that folder and it's going to tell you it's over four gigs or within resolve I can go to playback delete render cache manage cache data it's going to show my various projects and which projects are used in Cache files right now it's just this one post production one which is what we're in over four gigs I could check this and say clear cache and then close that and you can see this is turned red again and then also if you're ever experiencing any kind of funky issues like with a title or weird issues with color grading just anything visually that's not right it could be corrupt cache files so whenever that happens let's say this clip wasn't playing correctly I would just highlight it like it is and go to playback delete render cache selected clips and now it's going to re-render that clip and that will most of the time fix weird issues like that and then anytime you want to not use the caches created just go to playback render cache and set it to none and then go to playback delete render cache and you can tell it to delete all of it let's unused like maybe you had stuff in the timeline that you've removed but there's still cash from that it'll delete that or the selected Clips which we've already looked at now there's another type of rendering called render in place and it's different I I don't recommend using it but I need to show you what it is because you'll see it in the menu so if I control click right click on any clip rendered place is a menu item when I click on that it brings up a box like this where it's asking for format codec and quality we haven't talked about codex yet we're going to do that a couple lessons but this is basically the container it's a QuickTime file and this is the Kodak and this is the quality of that codec and once I specify these things and click render it's going to ask me where I want to create that file so if I go to resolve cache and I already have a folder I created called render in place for this example so I'm going to double click on that and click open and then it completed so how is this different than the other rendering well for example let me go back to playback render cache smart and you'll see the Blue Line isn't over this file anymore why because this file is no longer a raw clip it's been replaced with the QuickTime I just created so if I go to my resolve cache folder render in place you'll see it's an actual file that we can play but it's not at the high resolution that the raw files are at so this would not work for final delivery of your movie or for color grading or anything like that because if you color grade this you're color grading that file not the actual raw footage and the color grading will respond radically differently it just doesn't work you can't do it so why would you ever use this the only thing I can think of is if you have a film where you have maybe a lot of effects and you just can't get it to play back any other way or you just need to get a timeline in a place where it'll play back smoothly on any computer so you can go through here and get it to playback but that's really the only scenario I can think of when you're dealing with the normal render you're still dealing with the raw footage and so it's radically different now if you did do a render in place and you want to get back to normal you can control click or right click again and choose decompose to original and now you can see the red line here it's the raw footage again and then it's going to do the normal render like the rest of the timeline so again I don't ever recommend using render in place I don't think you ever need to especially with proxy files and such but that's what that is all about so that's rendering in a nutshell and there's another way to do render cache it's the user mode or talk more about that when we're doing the color grading course so that's it for now now let's talk about optimized media optimizing media is another way to help with playback and here's how it works if you go to your project settings again back to optimized media and render cache you can see that you can choose optimize media resolution and format so I'm working with 4K footage but I could say hey cut that in half make it 2K that's still going to be fine for my editing but it's going to be much easier for my computer to play back and then I can also specify the quality do I want prores 422 or 422lt or when the dnxhr HD codecs Etc and so with those things set you don't specify a location because it automatically puts these things in the cache files location folder we'll look at that in a second but once you set those things go ahead and save or if you didn't change anything just click cancel and then here's how this works you just highlight the clips you want to create optimize media for control click or right click generate optimized media and now under playback I'm going to say none for render cache and then I'm going to check use optimize media if available and now if we go look at finder to our resolve cache folder cache clip here's the optimized media folder and that's where all the files are located and if we don't want to use the optimize media at any point just go back to playback uncheck use optimize media if available so it's very straightforward now let's do a little test let's go to resolve cache and delete the cache clip folder entirely and now I'm going to generate optimize VD again in fact let's let's set it to half and two pro rows 422 save and then generate optimize media great now I'm going to go back to project settings for render cache format I'm going to set that to 422 click save now that's going to be it full 4K you can't change that but then go to playback render cache smart and let it cache those files okay now let's go to my external drive and let's compare the optimize media folder is 505 Megs the cache folder is 3.4 gigs interesting so right away I see we're taking a lot less space with the optimized media so that's kind of nice right but here's the thing if I get the scene cut together get my movie cut together and then I want to go to grade my footage so I jump over to the color grading page I can't grade the optimize media that's not going to work very well whereas with caching I can work with my color grading and be grading the raw files themselves we're going to talk about that more when we're in the color grading course so even though optimized media is taking a lot less space and I can run a 2K resolution and it's really nice for playback I'm always using the normal render cache and smart mode while I'm editing and then I'll jump to other modes when I'm doing color grading but if you want to use optimized media for any reason you saw how simple it is just make sure this is checked and if you don't want to use that uncheck it and you can jump in and delete those files Hey listen if you like this training you should really check out my film School write and direct it's an online film School designed for one thing to help aspiring directors realize their dreams faster than normal education routes what do I mean by that well I did the traditional thing I went to film school in Los Angeles and it was great it was fun I learned a lot but it cost a lot of money and here's the thing when you graduate from Film School pick your school it doesn't matter that is not going to land you a job in Hollywood at least not a job as a director okay Hollywood doesn't care about where you went to school what they do care about is what movies you have actually directed and were they any good okay so what do you do if you spend a lot of money on school and you're kind of tabbed out and then you realize that the only way forward is to begin directing movies and it's on your dime well that's a kind of a scary place to be that's why you'll see a lot of people in La working at restaurants and stuff because they're trying to make ends meet they're trying to pursue their dreams and it's tough writing direct helps you sidestep some of this all right I teach you not only did I go to film school but I've been working in independent film for years since then and I've worked on Studio films and I teach you how to do a movie from development through post-production we cover everything in granular detail so that you are equipped to pursue your dreams faster than I was able to than so many other aspiring filmmakers so check it out rightdirect.co I really hope to see you there and if not there I'll see you here on the channel very soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Write & Direct

Views: 8,786

Keywords: Film School, Optimized Media vs Render Cache, How to use optimized media in Resolve, How to use Render Cache in Resolve

Id: ybtjPh7JWg4

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023