User Manual

To turn Use Proxies on and off, do one of the following:
 Choose Playback > Proxy Mode > Half Resolution, Quarter Resolution, or None.
 Press PROXY ON/OFF on the T-bar panel of the DaVinci control panel (Defaults to
the last proxy resolution you selected from the menu. Half is the default if you haven’t
selected a resolution yet.).
Turning on one of the proxy resolutions reduces the working resolution by either half or a
quarter of whatever the current Timeline resolution is for your project. Working at a temporarily
reduced resolution increases your workstation’s real time performance, while the resolution
independence of Resolve guarantees that every window you draw and sizing operation you
make scales correctly to the actual resolution of your project.
Proxy Resolution Width Height
Full 8K UHD 7680 4320
Full UHD/Half 8K UHD 3840 2160
Full-HD/Half UHD/Quarter 8K UHD 1920 1080
Half-HD/Quarter UHD/Eighth 8K UHD 960 540
Quarter-HD/Eighth UHD/Sixteenth 8K UHD 480 270
Table of half and quarter proxy resolutions for different television frame sizes
Reducing Decode Quality
Improves Raw Media Performance
The Use Proxy command will improve performance when grades and effects are responsible
for your project’s slower than real time playback, but Use Proxy won’t help when real time
performance is being used up by the need to debayer raw media. While you could improve
playback performance by taking the time to either generate optimized media (see below) or
render to the Fusion Output Cache by enabling the Smart Cache (see later in this chapter), the
fastest solution is to open the Camera Raw panel of the Project Settings and reduce the
Decode Quality of the raw media formats you’re using:
 Decode Quality: Camera raw formats such as R3D and F65 can be debayered at
different levels of quality. For higher real time performance, you can choose a lower
quality setting while you work, and then switch to a higher quality when rendering the
final output.
Options for reducing resolution vary by each raw format’s differing capabilities, but at the very
least include full, half, and quarter resolution (R3D and Sony Raw have options for full, half,
quarter, eighth, and sixteenth). Exceptions include the Canon RAW, Panasonic Varicam RAW,
and Phantom Cine formats, which only decode to full resolution.
If you reduce the decode quality of raw media formats in your project to improve performance,
you can use the “Force debayer res to highest quality” checkbox in the Render Settings list of
the Deliver page to ensure that DaVinci Resolve renders all raw formats at the highest quality
available, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to change the decode quality back when
it’s time to render your deliverables.
Chapter – 6 Improving Performance, Proxies, andthe RenderCache 202