Here’s how to create super fast video renders in DaVinci Resolve

No matter what video editing application you use, one of the biggest pains is the speed at which your final video renders out. Even with a pretty powerful system, they can take a while, especially if you’re using high res footage with lots of effects. It turns out that Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve has a way to speed them up massively.

I recently switched to DaVinci Resolve, and so I’ve been following a few YouTubers pretty closely. One such YouTuber is Jamie Fenn, who puts out Resolve videos a couple of times a week. In this particular video, he shows us how we can optimise our settings to get some extremely fast renders in Resolve.

One of Resolve’s coolest features is called “Optimized Media”. It essentially allows you to convert your footage to something more suitable to your system’s specs for more efficient editing. It’s extremely useful when dealing with certain codecs that always seem to play choppy, no matter how good your system, or when doing multicam. It’s a bit like proxy editing, but without the hassle of actual proxy editing and having to render separate files, and then swap them out for the real ones before you render.

But depending on the codec you choose to use for your optimised media settings, you might be able to get away with rendering straight from those optimised files, rather than the original source – especially if you’re using high-quality codecs for that optimised media and your final destination is something like YouTube.

There are a few things you need to do in advance to set up and create your optimised media properly, and Jamie walks us through how to do that in the video. But after that, it’s just a case of checking a box in your render export settings. You do still have to initially wait for the optimised media to be created, but when you do, it’ll more than earn that time back during the editing process.

You can see there’s another option there, too, to “Use render cached images”. The render cache is the previews Resolve makes along the way in the background while you’re editing, for things like transitions and Fusion effects. If they’re already pre-rendered, and saved in a codec like ProRes (for Mac) or Avid DNx (for Windows), then you might as well use those as sources for your final output rather than having to render them over from scratch. Jamie walks us through how to set this up as well.

For me, DNxHR LB is plenty for my needs as a source to render from, especially when most of my footage is your basic 8-Bit AVCHD or H264 from a DSLR or mirrorless camera. And as it’s already been rendered in DNxHR LB format already while I’m editing, why not use those files? I mean, who doesn’t like faster renders?