Hide UI overlays: When enabled, onscreen controls such as the cursor, Power Window outlines, and split-screen views are disabled and hidden during playback.

The Playback Settings menu provides two more functions that can improve the playback performance but are turned off by default:

Optimized Image Processing: Relates to how image processing operations are handled.

Optimized Decode Quality: Relates to how clip resolution vs.

Optimized Sizing: Relates to how image resizing is handled.

The manual mode offers control over the following three parameters: Set to Automatic, Performance mode automatically optimizes a variety of operations in a bid to balance performance with the necessary level of image quality, for fast onscreen performance while always maintaining the highest level of quality for video output. The details of the Performance mode settings are described in the DaVinci Resolve 18 Reference Manual: Make sure the automatic setting is selected. These settings determine how the image is sized, decoded and processed and can therefore have an impact on the playback performance. The Performance Mode feature and Playback settings can be found in the User section of the Preferences menu (DaVinci Resolve > Preferences > Users > Playback Settings). The playback can be scaled down to half resolution, quarter resolution or turned off. Simply navigate to Playback > Timeline Proxy Mode and choose the desired setting. This function simply allows the user to downscale the resolution of the played clip in real time. The somewhat misleadingly named Proxy mode actually has nothing to do with proxy files or offline editing.

Start out by checking if the Proxy mode is turned on. Below is a rundown of tips and tricks you can try out if you ever find Resolve is behaving in a less than perfect manner. However, just like with any other application, it is constrained by the capabilities of the machine it is running on. No matter what function you may require, Resolve always seems to have you covered.

With its extremely competitive price point, valuable features and great flexibility, DaVinci Resolve’s rise in popularity over the past few years has been staggering.

Editing in davinci resolve