Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > Dell Technologies PowerScale: OneFS Best Practices for DaVinci Resolve > Dropped frame indicator and log
Dropped frames can occur for various reasons in DaVinci Resolve. Storage is only one variable including workstation performance, network, and corrupted media. For example, during testing for this paper, an image sequence with a few corrupt frames was problematic.
There are two primary locations in Resolve to monitor for dropped frames. Most playback pages within Resolve have a frame rate indicator which turns red if frames are dropped. The Color page reports dropped frames in a log file. That log file is only updated properly if the workstation has a Blackmagic Design Decklink™ card installed.
The Color page in Resolve reports frame drops to a log file that is in differing locations depending on the operating system. Those locations are as follows:
Linux: /opt/resolve/logs/rollinglog.txt
macOS: /Users/<User Account>/Library/Application\ Support/Blackmagic\ Design/DaVinci\ Resolve/logs/davinci_resolve.log
Windows: C:\Users\<user account>\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\logs\davinci_resolve.log
Upon start in the Resolve Color page (in a workstation with a DeckLink card installed), the log will have a line that reports hundreds or even thousands of frame drops. This number is a logging anomaly and can be ignored.
Next, there may be a single digit number of frame drops as Resolve ramps up performance. From that point onward, any additional frame drops will be logged.
As mentioned, frame drops may or may not be storage-related. It is worth noting where in the timeline frames start dropping. Do frames always drop at that particular moment? What is going on in the project at that time? Can the drops be replicated on different systems? Once those questions are answered, further investigations into what is causing the drops can be had.