I’ve been editing with DaVinci Resolve for quite a while, well over a decade in fact. It’s a terrific piece of software and gets more capable and competitive with each regular release. However, as with all complex pieces of multi-functional software, DaVinci is prone to bugs. In the past Blackmagic Design have shown a reluctance to even acknowledge the existence of long running bugs, so it’s worth formally documenting them again.

Six years ago I documented a variety of long running bugs with DaVinci. For a long time I even assumed that some of the bugs I was running into were quirks of my OS setup, my DaVinci database or even hardware issues on my machines. However last year I taught the editing module of the Film Diploma in Pulse College, and my students ran into many these problems – across installs of both DaVinci free and Studio versions, on over a dozen different machines and OS versions from iMacs and Macbook Pros to PC desktops. The audio source and rendering glitch issues in particular (see below), were experienced by all students.

It’s been a while, so I thought it was worth celebrating those bugs that have been fixed, those that persist and which new bugs are knocking around in the era of DaVinci Resolve 20!

New / Persisting Bugs

1. Vanishing Scopes
   
   Scopes always need to be reset for every new project in order to show.
   
   
2. Render Glitches
   
   DaVinci will randomly render glitches in compressed (H264 / H265) footage, without warning. This has a much greater likelihood of happening on large projects (documentaries / TV shows etc), but can randomly happen on short projects too. The only way around this is to manually check every render – which is fine for a doc or feature, but a nightmare for fast corporate / social edits. Another workaround is to render out to ProRes, and then compress in a third party programme like Adobe Media Encoder. This bug occurs far less often than it once did, but it still can happen many years after it first appeared.
   
   
3. Silent Playback
   
   This is the bug most disruptive to my personal workflow. DaVinci randomly changes audio playback channels – not just when a sound source changes (e.g.: headphones plugged in), but every time a project is opened or created, and every time a headphone is plugged in or out.
   If you have virtual channels set up on your mac, it will often select those, despite them not being the channels selected for playback by the OS.
   Or it may select another channel! Whatever channel it miss-selects, the project will often play back silently unless you manually select the ‘use system settings option’ in Video and Audio I/O preferences. I may have to fix this issue 30 or more times in a given day of editing.
   
   
4. AI Transcription
   
   There is no way to update the ‘spellcheck’ on AI auto transcribed videos, no matter how many times you correct a given word (often a proper noun, like a clients company name). You also can’t auto fix every mis-transcription of a word, and words can be mis-transcribed numerous different ways in a given transcription.
   
   
5. Clip Selection
   
   If a timeline uses multiple channels, switching to the colour tab never selects the clip or even the time directly under the playhead. There may be a way around this I’m not familiar with – the DaVinci Resolve ‘Beginners Guide’ is over 684 pages long.
   Aside: forum goblins who answer questions with ‘RTFM’ require psychological evaluation.
   
   
6. Playback
   
   Resolve will usually shrink the playback window when previewing at a lower resolution (see image at the top of this post).
   
   
   
7. Render Colours
   
   Getting accurate colours out of Resolve renders that match your editing timelines is still a challenge, and often requires trying a variety of different colour spaces / colour management settings – particularly when dealing with HDR footage, such as from a recent iPhone.
   
   
8. AI Audio Mix
   
   There are numerous issues with the new AI audio remixer – from fade outs at the end of a video remaining after the audio is extended, to auto adding fades between every cut (which can result in garbled voice audio). So this feature essentially can’t currently be used on dialogue.
   
   
9. Render Resolution
   
   If you render out a video at a lower resolution than your timeline – rather than creating a smaller video frame, the render is ‘punched in’ to the selected resolution.
   
   
10. Wildcard Naming
    
    Often, Resolve wildcard naming will fail. One (less well known, but very useful) feature lets you use a variety of %name wildcards in the File Name field, so you can render automatically using the timeline fail. Sometimes this feature simply fails, rendering the timeline as ‘untitled’. If you’ve queued up multiple timelines using this feature – they will render over one another, leaving you will one file, with the wrong name!
    

Fixed Bugs!

1 – Audio Popping on timeline scrub is long gone

2 – Timeline switching is now fast

3 – Resolve doesn’t crash nearly as much, and the processes usually don’t persist in memory either!

4 – Clip colours are no longer forgotten

5 – The deflicker plugin is still slow, but enormously more stable.