Edit 4K offline in DaVinci Resolve

Scrubbing a 4K clip in Resolve means dozens of disk reads per second as the playhead jumps around the timeline. A cloud-mounted drive cannot keep up: every seek becomes a network round-trip, latency spikes freeze the scopes, the playhead stutters, and the session becomes unusable in cafes or on a mobile hotspot.

Resolve is especially demanding because the colour page re-reads frames constantly, node processing and stabilisation pull extra reads, and the Fairlight and Fusion pages add their own passes. A generic cloud drive that streams the whole file on every access, with no real random-access seeking, turns a smooth grade into a slideshow.

The usual workaround, generating Resolve optimized media or proxies locally, works but doubles the footprint on the SSD, and the moment the colourist travels or the laptop fills up, the project has to be rebuilt. What you actually want is local-speed media for the edit and the full-resolution 4K only at the final render.

Once your proxies are generated by Sanbila in the cloud and cached on your SSD, Resolve reads them as ordinary local files. Scrubbing, JKL, compound clips, Fusion comps and stabilisation all work fully offline, because every read hits the SSD directly with no network round-trip per frame. Internet is needed only twice: once at import to upload the originals, and once at conform.

At conform, Smart Relink reads the project and switches the clips used on the timeline to the full-resolution originals, streamed back on demand, so the master renders from the real 4K rather than the proxy. Unused takes stay as light proxies, so a long documentary grades from a laptop without a 2 TB local copy.

For a travelling colourist this means grading 4K from a train or a plane with zero risk: pre-cache the proxies before you leave, and the whole edit and grade run with no connection at all until you are ready to render the master.