[Marc Wielage]

What happens if you open up a new video track and drop it just above where you want it to go, using the playhead to show where it needs to start?

Note that in the User Prefs under Editing, you can specify the minimum number of frames (or seconds) a still can have by default when dragged to the timeline. I’m not a fan of JPG stills because of the loss (and because they’re often 8-bit), but 10-bit TIFFs or PNGs can work OK. I use them all the time for various projects, and it’s not hard to do.

[Marc Wielage]

I hate when that happens!

If it makes you feel any better, I had an issue a few weeks ago where we had a Gallery problem, and I wound up losing all my PowerGrades. I had a back up of them, but it took a couple of hours to import them, label them, create new bins, and all that stuff. Total pain.

We make full system-wide backups often enough that most of that stuff (including LUTs) are there, but it’d take some time and effort to get there.

[Marc Wielage]

[Duke Sweden] “Whenever a project gets too heavy with timelines and files, I will “save as…” the project with a new name, then delete all the previous timelines except 2 or 3, this way I don’t have to bother with reloading galleries and stuff. Sometimes, as in this case, the new project gets corrupted straight away, and this latest glitch was the result. “
Yes, I have seen corrupted sessions happen with what I call “heavy” timelines: tons of cuts, lots of source material, complex color correction, and numerous timelines. Often, it’s a good idea to simplify the session by just doing a save-as and tossing all the unnecessary timelines.

I think a much more powerful machine and lots more RAM might solve this problem. Generally, laptops are not ideal for Resolve, but this is starting to change now that RTX GPUs are being offered in some top-of-the-line models.

[Marc Wielage]

No, not that I’m aware. I haven’t seen that in Baselight or a dozen other color programs as well.

[Marc Wielage]

Tero’s advice is good.

I would also suggest that you always export a second or two of SMPTE color bars and a grayscale ramp. Look at those on the scopes within Resolve, and then check the exported video on the scopes within Premiere. If the signals don’t line up in the same places, then you have a settings problem. Typically, that boils down to “Video vs. Full” Data Levels.

Jonny Elwyn also had a good piece on color management that explains why things sometimes change with video viewed in operating systems or other programs:

https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/colour-management-for-video-editors/

When you know that black levels have to be at 0, and the peak white pulse has to be at 100, it’s pretty easy to troubleshoot this and figure out where the settings are off.

[Marc Wielage]

What happens if you check the pre-multiplied settings on Clip Attributes for the file?

I have used ProRes 444 files before and generally had no problems with Alpha layers.

[Marc Wielage]

Resolve is demanding enough that I think you’re better off using a second machine if you need to do background tasks while rendering. Use a network connection to copy files across when necessary.

[Marc Wielage]

I would check the color management settings, check to see if any LUTs are missing, see if there’s a Timeline grade, see if any Pre/Post-Clip grades were changed, and also (most importantly) check Camera Raw settings.

Also: What hardware (CPU, RAM, GPU, disk i/o)? What OS? What specific version of Resolve? What kind of source material? What timeline resolution?

In general, I’ve had better luck since 15 with LiveSave rather than AutoSave. But I do manually save every so often, and I manually export a backup project once or twice a day.

[Marc Wielage]

Take a screen shot of your node tree and post it. It would be easier to visualize your setup rather than reading what you’re trying to do.

[Marc Wielage]

If you must run Resolve 14, do it on a different boot partition. You have to do that because it will attempt to access the Project Database, and that’ll be a trainwreck since it’s already been converted to the Resolve 15 format.

The instructions in Patrick’s article are very specific and I think work very well. The key to me is, if you absolutely had to, you could rent or borrow a cheap 2nd machine, install Resolve 14 on it (with a compatible operating system), import your exported Resolve 14 Project Database, and you could resurrect anything you needed there. And the second key is, it’s very safe to export an actual project file (DRP) and then import that into a new version of Resolve later on. That works about 99.9% of the time.

Absolute worst-case scenario (like a corrupted DRP), you could still import XMLs to rebuild the timeline and import all timeline stills to rebuild all the color corrections. But I’ve only had that happen twice in 9 years, which is a pretty good average. That’s like a brute force technique to reconstruct a session, and I have not seen that happen in some time.