Dropped Frames During Render

[Jason Brown]

I spent another round of time on the phone with Black Magic Design support. After much investigation, we determined that the black frames are due to a known issue related to the graphics card driver for NVIDIA 600 series. The use of particular LUT’s on nodes can cause random black frames to occur when using the current driver. I used an Arri Log C to Rec 709 LUT as a starting point on many the shots in my project. Apparently, I am the first to bring this particular issue to light in regards to the Mac Book Pro, rather than the tower & 3rd party graphics cards.

My work around was to pinpoint all shots that had black frames in the exported video file. Then, I re-rendered each trouble shot individually. Because the black frame issue is random, I was easily able to get clean shots. In a 110 minute timeline, there were approximately 20 black frames to eliminate. It took about 4 hours to manually correct the exported file in Avid Media Composer 6.5. All seems well now, but this work around may not appeal to those not wanting to re-encode 2 or 3 times.

Support was very helpful and seemed genuinely concerned about the issue. I hope that they will update Resolve to be compatible with all widely used graphics card drivers soon. I’m sure there will be a larger group of people getting this issue as they move into a broader market.

[Pepijn Klijs]

Wow, sounds frustrating. But thanks for sharing this, it could help others.

Wasn’t it possible to change the driver? maybe rollback to an older version?

Editor/Colorist, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.pepijnklijs.nl

[Jason Brown]

Yes it has been frustrating, but I’m happy that at least now I have a cleanly rendered film! We did contemplate installing the older Quadro driver, which does work properly in certain circumstances, however the older Quadro driver is not built to work with the particular NVIDIA 600 series graphics card in the Mac Book Pro. Support did a test of this on their system and was unable to reinstall the current driver and experienced compatibility issues in several applications. So with the Mac Book Pro, do not attempt to instal previous NVIDIA drivers as you may run into serious system issues.

[Perry Mulder]

Hi There,

Thank you for sharing.
Does anyone know what would be the best advice on a notebook.
Right know I use a Intel Xeon workstation with a Quadro 2000 card at home.
Works great with Media composer and DaVinci.
Now I’m looking for a notebook to edit on location as well. I tought the 600 or 700 series of nvidia would be a great option to keep the price low, but I see that does not work..
What would you advice?

Hope to hear from you guys,

Perry.

[Salil Neupane]

I have graded about 25 min film in Davinci Resolve 10 lite and
I am also having same issue every time I tried to rendered for FCPX XML roundtrip the frame dropped at some pint of time. Really Frasuted with this.

Hoping for some reply and solution for this

IMAC 21″ 2.5ghz i5,
4gb 133mhz Ram
AMD RAdeon HD 6750m 512 MB graphics
OSX 10.9