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Okay, solved it. Thought I should post in case anyone else is as stupid as me. I had the Mac OS system output set to the BM card and then in the Resolve Prefs Video I/O and GPU section I had 'Use System Audio Output' ticked so evidently the audio was being sent through the card twice. Auto Tune Davinci Resolved Davinci Resolve 16 Free Download Originally designed for Hollywood’s elite colorists, DaVinci Resolve has been used on more feature films and TV shows than anything else because it lets you create images that are simply impossible with other tools.

DaVinci Resolve January 11, 2020 5 min read Plugins are a great way to add functionality to your video post-production software. If you’re not familiar with plugins, they are essentially an extra software component you can add to a program, such as Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve lets you customize and save your own keyboard shortcuts. There are even built in presets for other application shortcuts, which makes it easier if you're switching to DaVinci Resolve from other editing software! Virtually every command and tool, including context sensitive menu items, can be assigned a keyboard shortcut.

Increasing the size of a low-resolution image is not always a good idea. However, Resolve 15’s new Super Scale feature changes the game.

There are many ways to use SD footage on an HD timeline: you can give the SD layer a background (as most news broadcasts do), you could duplicate the SD layer and expand and blur the bottom layer (as documented here), or you could increase the scale of the low-resolution media to fit the resolution of the timeline. However, increasing low-resolution media causes a handful of problems, such as pixelation, noise, and a loss of sharpness. Simply put, it makes the image look tacky.

Many software features can help with the resizing process and make an image appear clearer than it would if you simply increased the scale of the media. Now In Resolve 15, there’s a new upscaling feature that can resize HD to 8K. It’s called Super Scale. Resolve already has a fantastic image rescaling filter, which you can set up according to the requirements of your project — either through the setup menu or in the inspector.

The Super Scale tool is different. It uses an advanced algorithm that improves image detail upon enlarging — so it’s a processor-intensive operation. For the first several seconds of a clip that I enlarged from 1080p to 4k, I was getting 9 frames-per-second playback. The tool is more for SD media in a UHD timeline — or for when you need to zoom way into a 1080p clip on a timeline with a significantly higher resolution.

Where Is It?

The Super Scale isn’t as accessible as many other features — you won’t find it in the inspector, nor in any menu panels. To get to Super Scale options, right-click your media, and select “Clip Attributes.”

From there, you’ll find the Super Scale menu at the bottom of the video tab with three settings to work with: Super Scale, Sharpness, and Noise Reduction. The first setting changes the size of the file. You can choose from 2x, 4x, and 6x. The sharpness and noise reduction settings will then help you fine-tune the resize.

The still below is a screenshot zoomed in at 200% with the Super Scaled image on the right. It was a 1080p file Super Scaled to fit a UHD timeline. I’m not too sure how well the comparison image below is going to convey the results — perhaps not at all since we can only upload stills at a specific resolution (we have to make sure these tips load at lightning speed right?), but I encourage you to test out the Super Scale feature. There is a significant difference in quality between Resolve’s standard resize filter and the Super Scale feature. It’s magical.

Lewis McGregor is a certified DaVinci Resolve trainer.

Looking for more information on DaVinci Resolve? Check out these articles.

Stormy weather and decision making

Remember the days before GPS? The not-so-good old days, back when paper maps and outdated road signs were the only way to find new places?

For those of you who never experienced life before Google Maps and AI voice assistants, let me describe what it was like. You were completely dependent on your own sense of direction, your familiarity with the route, and your ability to clearly see what was around you.

This actually worked ok as long as conditions were clear and you already knew how to get where you were going.

But as soon as the sun went down or the weather turned bad, your ability to navigate fell off a cliff (and so did your car if you weren’t careful). And the worse the weather, the harder it was to make decisions about which way to go.

For post professionals, that’s not too different from trying to make creative decisions without real-time playback in your NLE.

Think about the last time you had to cut, grade, or mix without smooth playback. Not only was it slow and frustrating, but it likely hampered your creative decision-making. Choosing the best take of an actor’s performance, or deciding where to cut a scene based on emotional cues is difficult when you can’t watch a video smoothly.

When it comes to finding your way in a timeline, real-time playback is just as important as GPS when driving in a storm. Without clear vision, it’s challenging to make effective creative decisions for your film.

In today’s article, I’ll show you the five best ways to optimize performance in DaVinci Resolve, so your creative decisions are as smooth and real-time as possible.

How to measure playback performance

Before you can optimize the playback performance of DaVinci Resolve, you need to know how it’s doing already.

In Resolve, there is a Performance Indicator Light and a Frames Per Second (FPS) display in the top left corner of the main viewer window.

As you might have guessed, the Performance Indicator tells you whether overall system resources can obtain real-time playback, or a smooth playback experience, and the FPS display tells you how many frames the system can deliver every second.

A green performance indicator means the system is achieving real-time playback, while a red indicator means that there are not enough system resources available for real-time playback.

Note: A red light might indicate a limitation on CPU, GPU, or storage resources, or any combination of the three.

Luckily, if you find yourself in the uncomfortable situation where you can’t deliver real-time playback, there are a number of features and options available to enhance your performance without any change to the final export quality.

While it may seem redundant to have multiple features for what seems like a similar purpose, each feature is unique and useful in different situations and hardware configurations.

1. Performance Mode & other playback tweaks

Performance Mode is a fantastic feature that was recently added to DaVinci Resolve.

It intelligently analyzes your computer’s hardware configuration and automatically adjusts Resolve’s image processing under the hood. This delivers smoother playback without sacrificing the resolution or bitrate of the final output.

In other words, Performance Mode gives you better performance and a smoother creative experience without lowering the quality of your final video, even when your workstation is a bit out-of-date.

Yes, sharp-eyed finishing artists and colorists may notice a slight reduction in visual quality in the onscreen viewers, but Blackmagic gives us a few controls to tweak Performance Mode.

By default, Performance Mode is automatically enabled, but you can adjust or disable it entirely in the Playback Settings tab of the User Preferences menu (DaVinci Resolve > Preferences > Users > Playback Settings).

I recommend two useful settings in this menu called “Hide UI Overlays” and “Minimize interface updates during playback.” These settings sacrifice on-screen controls (such as mouse, power windows, and split-screen controls) during playback, which can usually squeeze out a few extra frames-per-second from the GPU.

One other important tidbit to know. While Resolve and R