User Manual

Table Of Contents
Using Optimized Media, Proxies,
andCaching Together
How you use DaVinci Resolve’s various performance-enhancing features together is entirely up
to you, but you should know that they’re not an either/or proposition. For example, you can
create optimized media from the camera raw original clips in your project, then enable Proxy
playback to enhance the performance of your 4K timeline, and turn on Smart Cache to speed
up your work in the Color page as you add Fusion effects, noise reduction, and ResolveFX or
OFX to every clip. All three of these optimization methods work happily and seamlessly
together to improve your performance while keeping the image quality of your project as high
as the Optimized and Cache formats you’ve selected in the Master Settings panel of the
Project Settings.
Other Project Settings
That Improve Performance
In addition to working with proxies, using reduced raw decoding quality, generating optimized
media, and enabling the Smart and User caches, there are five additional options in the Project
Settings window and one setting in the UI Settings panel of the User Preferences that you can
use to further improve real time performance if you’re working on an underpowered computer,
at the expense of lower image quality while you work. These settings can then be changed
back to higher quality modes prior to rendering.
Set timeline resolution to: (Master Project Settings, Timeline Format) DaVinci Resolve
is resolution independent, so you can change the resolution at any time and all
windows, tracks, sizing changes, and keyframe data will be automatically recalculated
to fit the new size. Lowering the Timeline resolution while you’re grading will improve
real time performance by reducing the amount of data being processed, but you’ll want
to increase Timeline resolution to the desired size prior to rendering. This is effectively
the same as using the Proxy command, but you get to choose exactly what resolution
you want to work at.
Enable video field processing: (Master Project Settings, Timeline Format) You can
leave this option turned off even if you’re working on interlaced material to improve
real time performance. When you’re finished, you can turn this setting back on prior to
rendering. However, whether or not it’s necessary to turn field processing on depends
on what kinds of corrections you’re making. If you’re applying any filtering or sizing
operations such as blur, sharpen, pan, tilt, zoom, or rotate, then field processing should
be on for rendering. If you’re only applying adjustments to color and contrast, field
processing is not necessary.
Video bit depth: (Master Project Settings, Video Monitoring) Monitoring at 8-bit
improves real time performance, at the expense of possibly introducing banding to the
monitored image.
Monitor scaling: (Master Project Settings, Video Monitoring) Lets you choose which
transform filter to use when scaling video to fit into the Video format resolution you’ve
specified. Options are Bilinear and Basic.
Chapter – 6 Improving Performance, Proxies, andthe RenderCache 214