DaVinci Resolve

Davinci Resolve is a proprietary video editor, color correction and compositing application.

Installation

Both a limited free version and a paid (Studio) version are offered.
For the free version, install davinci-resolve^AUR or davinci-resolve-beta^AUR.
For the Studio version, install davinci-resolve-studio^AUR or davinci-resolve-studio-beta^AUR.

To run DaVinci Resolve, it is required to use suitable OpenGL and OpenCL drivers. Open-source OpenCL drivers are currently unsupported. Please notice that incompatible OpenCL drivers should be uninstalled as they may cause Resolve to crash (e.g. uninstall opencl-mesa if you are using a proprietary equivalent).

Standalone Intel GPUs are currently unsupported. If using hybrid AMD + Intel setups, you can use the Intel GPU as the primary graphics card and use a proprietary OpenCL driver for the AMD GPU.

Table of OpenGL drivers
GPU vendor	OpenGL driver	Open Source	Documentation	Tested driver version	Works with DaVinci Resolve	Tested DR version	Notes
AMD	mesa	Yes	AMDGPU	22.0.0-1	Yes, but currently only for Vega and onward GPUs	17.4.5-1	AMD's ORCA legacy OpenCL driver requires ProGL. A resolve-amdocl-fix workaround seems to not work. See this bug report for more info. Tested with Radeon RX 580 (does not work) Tested with Radeon PRO W6600 (works).
AMD	amdgpu-pro-libgl^AUR	No	AMDGPU PRO	21.10_1247438-1	Yes	17.1.1	Requires running Resolve with the `progl` wrapper script. See documentation and the driver github for usage.
Intel	mesa	Yes	Intel graphics		Yes
NVIDIA	mesa	Yes	Nouveau		No
NVIDIA	nvidia-utils	No	NVIDIA	460.32.03-1	Yes	17.0b6-1	Tested on optimus laptop using nvidia-xrun.

Table of tested OpenCL drivers
GPU Vendor	OpenCL driver	Open Source	Tested driver version	Works with DR	Tested DR version	Comment
Neutral	opencl-mesa	Yes	22.0.0-1	No	17.4.5-1	DR behaves like with intel-compute-runtime (likely same cause). Launches normally, can open a project. But unable to start playing the timeline (even without video tracks) in the Cut and in the Edit pages. However in the Fairlight page it is able to play timeline. DR requires OpenCL 1.2. Mesa supports OpenCL 1.2, despite reporting it as OpenCL 1.1. Overriding OpenCL version with `CLOVER_PLATFORM_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.2 CLOVER_DEVICE_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.2 CLOVER_DEVICE_CLC_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.2` does not change the situation. Tested with RX580.
AMD	opencl-amd^AUR	Mixed pro and open components	22.10.1.50101-1	Mixed, see notes	17.4.3	Unfortunately, there is no currently AUR package with only repackaged rocm drivers from Ubuntu. On GFX8 (RX 580 and others), the ORCA legacy driver is used, which itself currently requires the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL drivers to work (see above). Tested with Radeon Pro W6600 (works, even with mesa) Tested with Radeon RX 580 (works, currently only with progl).
	rocm-opencl-runtime^AUR	Yes	5.1.1-1	Yes, for Vega and onward GPUs	17.4.6	Works with GFX9/Vega and above; works with Mesa OpenGL Tested with Radeon Pro W6600
	opencl-legacy-amdgpu-pro^AUR	No	22.10.1_1401426-1	Yes, for GPUs older than Vega	17.4.6-2	Note that this is simply the opencl-amd^AUR package without the ROCm drivers. Requires the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL drivers to work. Tested with Radeon RX580.
Intel	intel-compute-runtime	Yes	21.21.19914-1	No	17.2.1	Launches normally, can open a project. But unable to start playing the timeline (even without video tracks) in the Cut and in the Edit pages. However in the Fairlight page it is able to play timeline. Tested with Intel Core i7-8700 CPU. This is due to the 'cl_khr_gl_sharing' extension not being implemented.
	beignet^AUR	Yes	1.3.2+12+gfc5f430c-2	No		Core dumped
	intel-opencl^AUR	No	5.0.r63503-2	No		Core dumped
	intel-opencl-runtime^AUR	No	1:18.1.0.013-2	No		Core dumped
Nvidia	opencl-nvidia	No	460.32.03-1	Yes		Suitable, but working on cuda instead?

DaVinci Resolve Checker

You can run davinci-resolve-checker script, which will tell you if your configuration is suitable for running DR. In good configurations it should output:

All seems good. You should be able to run DaVinci Resolve successfully.

BlackMagic Design Cards

If using DeckLink, UltraStudio or Intensity cards for video capture and playback, install Desktop Video Software with decklink^AUR package.

Tips and tricks

Decrease installation time

Compression of a Davinci Resolve package takes significant time, because the binary is quite large. You can avoid compression and decompression by installing Davinci Resolve like this (assuming you use yay):

   $ PKGEXT='.pkg.tar' yay -S davinci-resolve

See Makepkg#Use other compression algorithms page for more information.

Using application in portable way

There may be reasons you may want to not install davinci resolve package to the system. For example, you do not want such big package to take space in system partition. Or you want to quickly switch between different versions of application: free and studio, current and previous versions. To do this, just unpack the contents of the needed versions package in the directory you want, and directly run the opt/resolve/bin/resolve from that directory.

Automating with scripts

DR supports scripting. Free version support launching the scripts only from within dr itself, while with Studio version you can also invoke scripts externally. To allow it, go to Preferences -> System -> General -> External scripting using. You can choose: None (similarly to Free version, only from within dr), Local (allow invokes from local host), and Network (allow invokes from remote host).

The documentation can be found in Help -> Documentation -> Developer.

Remap keyboard modifiers used with mouse wheel for scroll and zoom

The application uses very strange bindings of keyboard modifiers for zooming and scrolling timeline. Original behavior is the following:

shift + wheel = height of tracks
ctrl + wheel = scroll timeline
alt + wheel = zoom timeline
no modifiers + wheel = vertical scroll

It is impossible to remap this from application, see [1]. To workaround this problem, you can use IMWheel utility. It can remap modifiers only for the application described by regular expression.

Use the following config:

~/.imwheelrc

"^resolve"

    # just wheel for scroll
    None, Up, Control_L|Button4
    None, Down, Control_L|Button5

    # crtl wheel for zoom
    Control_L, Up,   Alt_L|Button4
    Control_L, Down, Alt_L|Button5

    # alt wheel for track height
    Alt_L, Up,   Shift_L|Button4
    Alt_L, Down, Shift_L|Button5

Alternatively, use the following blocks:

~/.imwheelrc

"^resolve"

     # just wheel for zoom
     None, Up,   Alt_L|Button4
     None, Down, Alt_L|Button5

     # shift wheel for scroll
     Shift_L, Up, Control_L|Button4
     Shift_L, Down, Control_L|Button5

Prevent prompt returning before full exit

When you exit application, the terminal prompt is returned to you, but suddenly the terminal is polluted with "Socket disconnected" message. To prevent this, pipe output of main process via cat. See here for explanation.

Troubleshooting

Logs location

DaVinci Resolve creates log file '$HOME/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/logs/ResolveDebug.txt' at every launch. If are you having problems, try to inspect it for useful messages.

Application window misses title bar

There is a workaround for KDE - a window rule to force enable title bar. See [2]

You can manually create a file describing needed window rule:

DaVinci_Resolve_main_window_always_with_titlebar_and_frame.kwinrule

[DaVinci Resolve main window always with titlebar and frame]
Description=DaVinci Resolve main window always with titlebar and frame
clientmachinematch=0
noborder=false
noborderrule=2
titlematch=0
types=1
wmclass=resolve
wmclasscomplete=false
wmclassmatch=1

Then go to System Settings > Window Management > Window Rules and import this file.

Mp4 clips are not working

In DR Free the MP4 containers are not supported. Their preview image is shown as blank. And AAC audio stream (mp4 uses that format) is not supported. When you place that clip to timeline, it will be just an audio clip with silence.

In DR Studio the mp4 videos are supported, but AAC decoding is still not supported. When you place your mp4 clip to timeline, you will get the normal video track, and the audio track will be silent.

Workaround for DR Free

You need to convert your video file to another format. Transcoding command may look like this:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v dnxhd -profile:v dnxhr_hq -pix_fmt yuv422p -c:a pcm_s16le -f mov output.mov

You can automate this task using incron. It will automatically convert files appeared in specified folder. See setup example on this article. Another alternative is to write a resolve script for that purpose. See documentation for Resolve Scripting (linked in the see also section) for more information.

Workaround for DR Studio

You need to extract the audio from mp4 clips and convert it to mp3 (takes less space than wav and is supported, see below). Then you can import it and make a compound clip with video track.

You can use mp4 audio compounder.py resolve script by Andrew Shark, which automates this routine.

There is no yet (as of February 2022) a document listing supported codecs for DR 17, but DR 17.1 and DR studio 17.4.3 both supports mp3 files. However, for some reason, integrating mp3 audio to mov file is not playing.

HiDPI

To enable compatibility with high-resolution displays, set the following environment variables accordingly:

export QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=2
export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=true

Source: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=84614&p=469009&hilit=hidpi#wrapper

Wine version

Some plugins are available for Windows, but not available for Linux, so you may want to use Davinci Resolve via wine. Also, wine version could potentially workaround the linux-only problem of mp4 format issues. Wine 6.5 brings OpenCL 1.2 support, which is required for DR. Unfortunately, there was no success to start DR via wine. See test results here. In 17.4.1 DR cannot see the list of available gpus (wine 6.21). Probably, need some hack to make wine present gpus to applications.

Wrong OpenCL Version

If the application simply is not starting, even after showing installer and "tour" successfully your OpenCL Version may not match your NVIDIA driver. If you have installed nvidia-440xx make sure to install opencl-nvidia-440xx as well. A possible error message:

~/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/logs/LogArchive/ResolveDebug_C1.txt

...
OpenCL error -1001: 'Unspecified Error', GPUPropertiesUtilUnix.cpp:338
...

Get back to Onboarding screen

If you are experimenting with driver installation, you may want to start from the welcome tour and onboarding screen, which checks your system and graphics card. You can achieve that by removing configs directory:

rm -r $HOME/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/configs

Full screen preview function missing

This function is only available in the studio version. It is in menu Workspace > Video Clean Feed.

No audio during video preview

DaVinci interfaces the ALSA directly, so you need to redirect it to use PulseAudio by creating asound.conf in /etc/ with the following content:

/etc/asound.conf

pcm.!default pulse
ctl.!default pulse

Error code 999 on intel/nvidia hybrid graphic card

"The GPU failed to perform image processing because of an error. Error Code: 999."

If nvidia gpu is used in on-demand mode, you have to explicitly demand it. To enable set the following environment variables:

export __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1
export __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia

Silent crash related to libcrypto.so.1.0.0

Possible crash message:

~/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/logs/ResolveDebug.txt


...

==========[CRASH DUMP]==========

Please send this to support:

#TIME Sat Jan 23 19:42:20 2021 - Uptime 00:00:08 (hh:mm:ss)
#PROGRAM_NAME DaVinci Resolve v16.2.8.005 (Linux/Clang)

/opt/resolve/bin/resolve() [0x550e0a9]
/opt/resolve/bin/resolve() [0x550d89a]
/usr/lib/libpthread.so.0(+0x140f0) [0x7f80d90640f0]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x15df7e) [0x7f80d6af5f7e]
/opt/resolve/bin/../libs/libcrypto.so.1.0.0(lh_insert+0xad) [0x7f80d8aa2e4d]
/opt/resolve/bin/../libs/libcrypto.so.1.0.0(OBJ_NAME_add+0x65) [0x7f80d89f1855]
...

Replace /opt/resolve/libs/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 with /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0:

# cp /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /opt/resolve/libs/libcrypto.so.1.0.0

Missing Workflow Integrations menu

In DR Studio for Windows and Mac OS there is Workspace -> Workflow Integrations menu. Workflow Integration plugins are written in JavaScript (electron applications). As noted in documentation (you can reach it in Help -> Documentation -> Developer), Linux currently is not supported (checked in 17.4.3). They say Integration Scripts are supported in Linux, this is most probably a mistake, because they did not provided a path where to put them and still the menu is missing (it is that same Workspace -> Workflow Integrations).

Python 3.6 not found

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Please help to write this section. (Discuss in Talk:DaVinci Resolve#Python 3.6 not found problem)

When going to Workspace -> Console -> Py3 the error window appears saying "Python 3.6 not found".

One solution is the following (from this question):

env PYTHON_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--enable-shared" pyenv install 3.6.11
sudo ln -s $HOME/.pyenv/versions/3.6.11/lib/python3.6 /usr/local/lib/python3.6
sudo ln -s $HOME/.pyenv/versions/3.6.11/lib/libpython3.so /usr/local/lib/libpython3.6.so

In DR 18 they say that all python 3 versions are supported.

Kill hanged process

If dr hanged, fails to release a terminal when you press ctrl + c (to send sigint), and when its window is not shown and you cannot open dr again (it is saying another instance is already running), you can still fix it. Open task manager (ctrl + esc in KDE), then search for process named "GUI", then kill it (send signal 9). Now you can start dr normally.