MY DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK!!! No, really, it did. If that dog was called Davinci Resolve, and my homework as a new video I was working on …
I told you I’d do How-Tos, and this is one is FRESH! Like, TODAY fresh! OK, I’m posting this shortly after midnight, so technically it was yesterday, but I digress.
I was in the Resolve this evening and ran into a fairly serious (to me) bug. I think I know the reason, I have a workaround, and I’m going to describe it in detail, in case you’re experiencing it too!
First, the history. This comes into play with my proposed theory on the cause of the issue.
I have been using Davinci Resolve 16 for the past several months for my YouTube channel, and recently upgraded to Resolve 17 Beta 5. I quickly found that, on my PC at least, there is a bug in the “Digital Glitch” effect, which causes playback to stutter, stop, and basically freeze up Resolve. OK, don’t use that effect, wait for the full release, no big deal. Today’s bug, however, is much more serious.
I had created 2 projects in Resolve 16, both with Multicam clips in them. The audio sounded fine, I upgraded to Resolve 17, and I didn’t bother with them for a couple of weeks while I worked on other videos.
Flash forward to this evening, when I opened the first one up to do some more editing on it. I started playback at the very beginning of the timeline, and noticed immediately that the audio sounded scratchy and quiet. I skipped ahead and continued playback. Still scratchy. I went back to the start, and began playback. That’s when I noticed it. Parts of my Intro video’s audio track were playing interlaced with the audio from the Multicam clip. That’s weird, I thought.
So, I opened another project, which also has Multicam clips in it. Same. Exact. Problem. Only, when playing a single-cam clip, the audio was fine.
Troubleshooting began, and I couldn’t find the source of the problem. I noticed during this process that if I right-click on the Multicam clip and select “Flatten”, that the audio playback returns to normal. That won’t work – I still have hours of footage to scrub through and select the right camera angles. Uh oh.
As I continued to troubleshoot, I tried to delete the Multicam clip from my Timeline and drag & drop it from the Media Pool. Now I see something even weirder! The clip includes video, but no audio track!
Finally, I duplicated the Multicam clip (right-click on the clip in the Media Pool and select “Duplicate Clip”) and dragged it onto my Timeline. The video and audio tracks both come over into the Timeline and playback is normal! Success! Well, it’s a workaround anyway.
So, for the time being, I’ll take my duplicate clips and layer them over the originals in my Timeline, make the edits and camera angle switches at the same place, and continue about my day. But I’ll still worry about whether or not this bug will reappear.
I have a strong suspicion that something in the Project changed between Resolve 16 and Resolve 17, which created this problem, and duplicating the clip somehow changes the clip and allows proper audio playback.
Good luck, and let me know in the Comments below if you’ve experienced this issue and what you did to work around it!
-John