I'm Alexis Van Hurkman and welcome to Resolve
in a rush where you'll learn DaVinci Resolve
grading and finishing techniques in under
5 minutes.
In this lesson I'm going to quickly go through
a few things that you can do to improve the
performance of DaVinci Resolve.
If you've got a slower machine the performance
can be a little bit challenging but there
are a few things you can do to improve performance.
First thing I'll show you is, if you go into
the Preferences, if you happen to have a Black
Magic I/O video device of some kind
and you have it turned on in here but you're
not using it, you're actually wasting processor
cycles processing video to go out that isn't
actually going out.
Turning that off is going to improve performance
for you just right off the bat, that's one
thing you can do and that improves performance
in both the Edit and the Color page.
From there, if you open up the Project Settings,
if you look in the Video Monitoring section,
you'll see that there is a Video bit depth
pop up.
You can actually lower that to 8 bit whether
you're outputting the video or not and that
will improve your performance at the expense
of perhaps introducing a little bit of banding
for certain images on their way out.
Also, you can set the Monitor scaling to Bilinear,
again this is a lower quality way of scaling
images but it can give you a little more performance.
Another thing you can do, is to turn on this
Hide UI Overlays for optimized playback checkbox.
This primarily will speed you up in the Color
page but I think it will probably speed you up in the
Edit page as well.
Those are all of the performance improvement
stuff that are found in the Master Project
Settings, but if we jump over into the General
Options, we have a few more things that we
can do.
Up at the top here, if you're using Smart
Caching, that is Resolve's mechanism for rendering
clips that have effects or color corrections
that it judges are too computationally intensive
to play in real time you can choose what codec
you're cashing your frames to here and be
aware if you are using media that has wide
latitude, you've got really bright highlights
and you don't want those to get clipped, make
sure you cache your frames to Uncompressed
16-bit float.
Otherwise if you're just looking to save space
on your cache drive, then you can choose whatever
cheap format you want to use.
You also have the option in DaVinci Resolve
to use Optimized Media.
You can optimize your media, which is basically
re-rendering pre-cached copies of the clips
you're editing and grading using different
size and using a different format and you
can switch back and fourth between using your
optimized media, and using the original media
depending on whether you're doing an offline
edit or you're finally decided to start finishing,
so those settings are found here, you want
to make sure that your cache files are being
written to a fast volume.
Now those, I'm going to go ahead and save
these settings, those volumes are defined
back here in the Preferences.
If you go into Media Storage, the very first
Scratch Disk that is listed in this list is
the one that's used for storing cache files.
You want to make sure that this is set to
a really fast hard drive, a fast drive array,
whatever you're fastest volume is, that's
what you want to use as your scratch disk.
By default, if you don't have anything in
this list, this is going to be your system
disk and A. that's probably not the fastest
disk you have and B. if you fill that up with
cache files, you're going to have bigger problems.
I'm going to go back to my Project Settings
and point out that if you're using any kind
of Camera Raw format and DaVinci Resolve supports
a lot of camera formats, another thing
you can do to improve your quality is to change
the Decode Quality.
So most raw codecs let you debayer to lesser
resolutions, smaller resolutions is less for
Resolve to process, so thing's are going to
move more quickly.
But you also have the option of having two
settings: an overall Decode Quality when the
playhead is paused and then a Play Quality
which Resolve is capable of dropping to whenever
you hit play to see your program in motion.
So if you want to leave your Decode Quality higher and lower your Play Quality, that's
something that you can do.
If you play around with lowering the Decode Quality and lowering your Monitor scaling,
be aware that in the Deliver page, if you
open up the More Options sections of the Render
Settings list, you have a checkbox that enables
you to always Force sizing to the highest
quality and always Force debayer resolution
to the highest quality.
So, these checkboxes are there to protect
you from forgetting to reset the those quality
settings back up on full before you kick out
an overnight render and potentially make yourself
really sad in the morning.
So, another thing that you can do to increase
performance if we go up to Playback, this
is where we have a Proxy Mode, so you can
drop the Resolution of clips being viewed
in any of the viewers by Half or by a Quarter.
So if I drop this to a Quarter, right there,
basically DaVinci is going to do a temporary
resize under the hood.
So, that there are fewer pixels to process and
this is going to improve performance at the
expense of temporarily lowering the quality and
then of course, going back to Playback here
are the Render Cache settings.
Setting this to Smart automatically sets Resolve
up to flag any clips in the timeline and as
long as the Smart Cache is turned on, Resolve
is going to automatically start rendering
to the scratch disk whenever you're not actually
working.
It only renders when while you're paused.
Soon as you start doing something, it's going
to stop rendering and let you do what you're
doing.
So that's just a quick overview of all the
different things that you can do to improve
performance in DaVinci Resolve on slower machines.
I hope this has been useful for you.
If you want more information about using DaVinci
Resolve, check out my tutorials at RippleTraining.com.
I'm Alexis Van Hurkman.
Thanks for watching!
