I switched almost exclusively to using Resolve as an NLE over a year ago, after years of using the product on and off. It’s matured into a powerful full featured editing and grading suite. Since I received the full version for free with my black magic pocket camera I’ve had access to the even more powerful tools available in Studio. However… The more time I spend with Resolve, working on professional corporate projects, the more I find myself struggling to work around what seem to be long term intractable bugs with the software. Perhaps some of these are issues with my setup, but they’re just the kind of intractable inconsistent bugs that no amount of updating drivers and reinstalling Resolve can fix. Judging by the numerous threads on Blackmagic’s forum they seem to affect numerous users, and I suspect many of them may be ongoing issues with the software. At this point enough have accumulated that they’re having a strong negative effect on my productivity. Some are minor niggles, some are really serious issues, some can be worked around, some can’t; but taken together they’re making the experience of using Resolve stressful and not something I can easily recommend. I’ve compiled the issues I’ve continued to run into – across multiple computers and ongoing since at least Resolve 13, below. All these issues persist on the latest full Resolve release – 16.1.1. I’ve also posted this to the resolve forum here, so lets see if there are any useful responses.
1. Resolve always forgets which tracks you have muted when you move between sequences with stacked timelines.
2. When working with large projects – even on a system with 32gigs RAM, editing from NVME and using fast SSD caching, switching timelines can take up to 10 seconds. This can make copying footage back and forth between timelines an absolute chore.
3. After shutting down Resolve (and also after a crash), Projects almost always remain active as hidden processes that have to be manually killed in process manager before resolve can be restarted.
4. Resolve has excellent GPU acceleration, but I have to disable GPU H265 and BRAW decoding or suffer frequent crashes (this is on an RTX 2060 with 6gb of RAM and yes, the latest Nvidia creative drivers). This is the official recommended action by Blackmagic support, even though it enormously slows down render times.
5. Often after a render (as in almost every time) subsequent renders will fail and resolve must be restarted to render anything.
6. When rendering to H264 on a video with alpha transparency resolve usually creates visual glitches, especially on white block colour backgrounds. This happens so often I have to always render to H265 – which cant be used for videos intended for social media platforms.
7. Resolve sometimes temporarily forgets clip colours which have been assigned when moving between timelines.
8. Editing videos with multiple audio channels, when skipping around a timeline while playing, resolve will often emit extremely loud high pitch pops and squeals. Sometimes resolve will also emit a constant high pitch noise when scrubbing clips at double speed.
9. When you drop a PNG onto the resolve timeline that’s smaller than the resolution of the timeline, the parts that should be transparent are black – unless you apply even the smallest of crops on any side of the image – in which case they immediately become transparent.
10. Resolve’s OFX Deflicker plugin is fantastically effective at removing flicker. However it’s incredibly unstable. Scrubbing or playing back footage that has the plugin applied to a node will often lead to ‘out of GPU’ memory bugs, this can also happen just attempting to render. Once this bug is seen, resolve renders will always fail until the programme is restarted.
11. When a whole sequences is selected, often cuts / pastes etc will affect locked channels – even though they were locked prior to selection. This can lead easily to accidental deletion, particularly of audio.
12. Resolve frequently renders footage darker / more saturated than it appears in the preview window.
Gareth Stack - Blog 