Speed up Davinci Resolve and Fusion playback

hey what is up youtube it's terence and i'm back with another video today's video is about playback and performance issues you might face while using resolve if you're watching this video then you definitely have face up performance issues i'm going to be showing you how to fix them i want to quickly thank everyone for 1k subs i really appreciate that despite not posting a lot i still got some growth so i just want to say thanks before we start i want to urge you to watch the entire video the information is very useful and is guaranteed to save someone from pulling their hair out i am not the type to say click this click that without giving an explanation of what i'm doing i want you to have a good understanding and then you can improve upon that with that let's start with the topics i will be discussing drive types using multiple drives and using proxies and optimized media then i'll dive into some cooler switches and this awesome node that you can use in the fusion page these are all things that will help you speed up your workflow when it comes to performance let's start with the drive types if your system is running on a hard drive or you're editing media from a hard drive you may have a hard time hard drives are pretty slow they're a great solution when it comes to archiving and storing files but they aren't great for editing simply because they're so slow it's best to have an ssd nvme or m.2 drive because they're way way faster than hard drives in an ideal world having three of these fast drives would be great onedrive would have your operating system and davinci resolve the other would have your media that you're actually editing and the last one would store your cache this would allow you to read and write files to and from these drives a whole lot quicker because none of them would be bogged down by some other process like i said this is ideal but not always possible for a few reasons maybe you're on a laptop and you can't put multiple drives inside the system or maybe you just don't want to spend the cash to get all these extra drives in my desktop i have a three drive setup but my laptop only supports two drives so one drive runs the operating system davinci resolve and has my media files and another drive stores all the cash i don't work in a big film studio so most of the time i'm working with highly compressed video formats like h.264 and b4 files these are great for your average everyday consumption like online streaming and using them on your mobile phone for editing they're quite terrible because resolve has to decompress these highly compressed files and that takes a lot of processing power this is where proxies and optimized files come in proxies in optimized files achieve the same thing they create optimized versions of your media files and link them to your project that way your timeline is a lot faster and smoother they have a few differences between each other proxies generate whole files that can easily be moved from one drive or computer to the next if you're working on a project with someone else it's better to use proxies because you can send the files to the other person and they'll be able to use them they can easily be linked and unlinked from a project this makes them very reliable for the cons proxies have to be generated as whole files you can't generate a partial proxy so if you want 10 seconds of a 2 minute clip you'll have to generate a proxy for the entire 2 minute clip despite only needing 10 seconds optimized media on the other hand generates a folder of multiple files for a single clip its pro is being able to generate optimized media for only parts of a clip for example if you drag 10 seconds of that 2 minute clip onto a timeline you can generate optimized media for that clip and not the entire file saving you drive space and some time as it will take you less time to create a smaller file for cons optimized media can't easily be moved between computers since they can be linked and unlinked like proxies while i like using proxies a lot more sometimes i use optimized media depending on the scenario let's quickly have a look at how to change your cache location under the davinci resolve menu hit preferences and under the system tab go to media storage here you should see media storage locations you can add and remove storage locations here like i said before i recommend using a whole other drive if you're able to here my system runs on the c drive but i have my cache under the d drive saving my cache on another drive gives me a little bit more speed if you go to the file menu you will see project settings you can also press shift nine as a shortcut to get to it if you scroll down you'll see optimize media and render cache and here you have a few different options by default it's set to dnx hr this is a great option for windows users i'm not sure if on mac there's pro res and i'm not sure what is on linux for windows users you can select the quality of the files here the bigger the file the longer it will take to generate the optimized media proxy or render cache and the more space it will take up the smaller the file it will generate faster and it will take up less space but as you know there will be a loss in quality me personally i use dnxhr sq for this scenario i'm just going to be using lb here where it says enable background cache after five seconds i usually set this to one so it starts caching immediately as for those cool little switches i mentioned earlier here they are under the playback menu you'll have two options here you may or may not want these checked and i'll explain why in a moment here under the timeline proxy mode you can switch your timeline to half resolution and quarter resolution making the workload less on your pc on the render cache you can set this to none smart or user i recommend using user and not smart because you can choose the files that you want cached while it may take a second to choose the file and cache it it works out a lot better in my opinion because you save on space and you save on processing time under playback you also have the fusion memory cache i recommend leaving this as on you can also cache nodes on the color page let's say i'm on the color page and i want to do some denoising which is usually a heavy process inside of resolve i do my denoising and now the playback is kind of choppy in this case it's not but let's say it was you can right click on the node and go to node cache and set it to on once it's on you realize that the number on the node it turns red that means it's creating a cache once it's done it's going to turn blue and you'll have smooth playback unless you make changes to this node under the delete render cache menu you have all unused clips and selected clips from time to time you will want to delete these cache files because they take up a lot of space you don't want to be filling your cache drive or your disk space but this works kind of finicky to be honest like here if i click all and click delete it doesn't tell me if it deletes all the files or not if i browse to the folder on my system where i have my cache you'll see here that under cached clip i still have a bunch of files in here if i should go to proxy media i still have on my proxies in here so you may want to come in here from time to time go to your proxy media delete the proxy files and go to the cache clip folder and delete these cache files you can clear the gallery folder but this typically holds information and thumbnails for your projects a few minutes ago i mentioned that i'd be explaining why sometimes you want to turn use proxy media and use optimized media if available on or off i got this clip right here from pexless.com it's from a user named cotton bro so shout out to cotton bro for making this free to use and here you can see that i have proxy media for this file it says unlink proxy media here and scrubbing through the timeline is extremely fast now if i should zoom in on some of the faces here you can see that it doesn't look that sharp my cache is set to dnxhr lb so that's a pretty low quality i go to the playback menu and set this to off after a few seconds you should see it update and show the 4k clip if it doesn't might just want to scrub it a little bit this here it looks better than it was before if i turn use proxy back on you can see the pixels coming and it looks kind of crappy if you're working with say 1080p clips it's gonna look even worse and the issue that i always have is on the color page if i want to say denoise the clip or if i'm color grading a clip or sometimes if i'm looking at multiple clips with the proxies turned on it might be a little bit misleading like here for example if i was going to denoise this clip i might feel like i want to denoise it a lot to compensate for the bad looking footage but if i actually turn the proxy media off i will see that i would i will not need as much denoising as i was applying or i might do too heavy a color grade or not color grade is good so whenever you're color grading it's a good thing to switch optimize media and proxy media off and set your timeline proxy mode back to off that way you have your timeline looking at its highest quality another little switch that's often overlooked is the color and fusion bypass switch i have this masterful composition right here that i just made now i have my masterful color grade and my fusion timeline and if i try to play this it's going to run extremely slow right to speed things up here what you can do is turn things off with the bypass switch this turns off my fusion clip and it also turns off the color this is not what i want you can actually right click the switch and choose what you want to bypass so if i want to see my my fusion but not the color i can choose to bypass color but not fusion now i'll see the fusion composition but not the color grade and vice versa since we're here you should notice this line above my timeline here that's the cache line and the blue part shows us already cached and the red line shows what hasn't been cached as yet this is actually creating a fusion cache for this clip it's able to do this because under the render cache fusion output it's set to auto you can set this to on manually or you can set it to off i recommend keeping it on or keeping it on auto if this is caching too slow for you what you can do is go back to the project settings by hitting shift f9 or here in the file menu and under your render cache format you can set that to something lower what you have here so in my case i'm at the lowest so it's caching as fast as it can if i had it on hqx it will take a longer time to cache it because it's using a higher quality gonna take more time and take more file space and the trick that i found that works well is going into your task manager and finding davinci resolve you want to drop this down and go to the resolve exe right click and go to details once you're on the details page you want to right click it and go to set process priority and set it to real time hit change i'm not going to do this right now once you hit change it's pretty much going to slow down every other process on your computer for a sec and gives davinci resolve the full attention and i realize that that makes it cache just a little bit faster the last thing i mentioned is a node that will speed things up inside of the fusion page and this node is the resize node this node can be used to resize the footage to match your timeline or in this case help to make things run a little bit faster you can see here at the top that the resolution of my current video is four zero nine six by two one six zero and that is 4k that is very intense on the system if i should hit shift and drop the resize node in here under the settings right here i can click keyframe aspect ratio i can just drag any of these sliders and it's going to decrease the the quality of the frame while keeping everything else at the same size we drop it to 640 by 341 that's a very low resolution but now things are going to render a whole lot faster and i can move around a bit quicker inside the fusion page once i'm done i can simply turn off the resize notes and make it back to its normal size or i can hit shift and drag it out and i'll be ready for rendering if you made it this far thanks for watching the entire video that about wraps up all my tips using a combination of these tips will be sure to help you get through your next video with way better performance if you like this video don't forget to hit like if you aren't subscribed please do and let me know in the comments if you'd like to see me do something like this for another application light blender see your boy terence and i'm out peace [Music] you

Channel: Terr

Views: 14,921

Keywords: tutorial, fusion, speedup, speed, up, blackmagic, adobe, after effects, after, effects, premiere, pro, workflow, quick, tip, terrence, davinci, resolve, faster, compositing, channels, video, editing, choppy, stutter, stutter fix, proxy, caching, playback speed, timeline

Id: s5HwZiGF7-g

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022