How to get Real-time Playback in DaVinci Resolve

What’s going on everyone, welcome to another epic video. Today we are going to be talking about how to get real-time playback in DaVinci Resolve. This is a great optimization hack.

        I have a timeline here with some clips shot on different cameras in different resolutions. Since this is not a color grading tutorial, I am going to skip to clips that are already graded.

        The first thing we are going to do is go under our settings and make sure our timeline resolution is set to 4k.

Now if we go to our color page and hit play, we can see that this is choking pretty hard.

How can we fix that? The first thing we can do is turn off nodes with OFX on them. It’s a good practice to keep them off until the end, then turn them on. Now when we hit play, we gain 7 fps in playback.

        The next tip is the actual hack to get real-time playback in DaVinci Resolve. Go under master settings and change the timeline resolution to 1080p. Boom, we are playing back in real-time now.

Changing the timeline resolution does not change the clip resolution.

        Moving through the clips, the Sony clip is playing back in real-time. The Canon 4k RAW is going up to 22 frames. If we drop our resolution in camera RAW on the Canon to quarter, it will playback in real-time.

Unfortunately it’s not looking great, so you will want to let it use project settings.

        The R3D clip is almost playing back in real-time, but it is pretty choppy. This, because it was shot in 5K, we can drop the resolution in camera RAW and once we do that, smooth playback.

        So guys, this is a quick hack to get the best performance out of your machine, without optimizing media or rendering cache. With that, I hope you can use these tips!

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