# DaVinci Resolve Import Stuck at 0%: Every Real Fix

> **Quick answer:** DaVinci Resolve rarely freezes at 0 percent; it's usually decoding a heavy codec silently, waiting on a cloud-sync placeholder file, or stuck generating background proxies. Check Activity Monitor or Task Manager for real CPU or disk activity first. No activity at all points to a missing Media Storage location, a blocked permission, or a corrupt file.

*Published by [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com) — the AI tutor that teaches DaVinci Resolve on your own screen.*
*Updated 2026-07-18 · DaVinci Resolve 21.0.2 (July 2026) · Canonical: https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-import-stuck-at-0-percent*

Your footage sits in the import window. The progress bar reads zero. It's read zero for four minutes now, and you're starting to wonder whether you should force quit, unplug the drive, or just go make coffee and hope it sorts itself out.

Here's the part almost nobody tells you: **a stuck-at-zero import is Resolve working before it is Resolve failing, and the difference shows up in your Activity Monitor, not in the progress bar.** Resolve's import UI has one job, moving a bar from left to right, and it only updates that bar once it finishes a chunk of work it can actually measure. Several of the things that happen before an import visibly starts, decoding a heavy codec's first frame, waiting on a cloud-sync placeholder to hydrate, generating a thumbnail, produce zero visible movement while they're happening. You're not watching a crash. You're watching a UI that can't show you what's underneath it.

That said, real hangs do happen, and this guide walks through both: how to tell which one you're looking at in under two minutes, and every actual cause behind the false alarms and the genuine freezes alike.

## What does "stuck at 0 percent" actually mean in DaVinci Resolve?

DaVinci Resolve's media import has no fine-grained progress reporting for the early stage of the process. When you drag a clip into the Media Pool, or use the Media Storage browser to bring footage in, Resolve has to do several things before it can render even the first visible frame of progress: locate and open the file, read its container and codec metadata, decide whether it can hardware-decode that codec or needs to fall back to software, and, depending on your preferences, kick off a thumbnail render and an audio waveform scan in the background.

None of that produces a percentage Resolve can show you. The bar sits at zero the entire time, then jumps once real transcoding or copying work starts, because that's the first stage with a measurable byte count behind it.

This is a real, longstanding gap in the interface, not a quirk specific to your machine. A [Blackmagic Forum thread specifically requesting a real progress indicator for imports](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=160769) makes the case plainly: operations like export or import can take a long time, and it's genuinely disconcerting not knowing whether anything is working or when it will finish. That thread exists precisely because Resolve doesn't tell you, and users have been asking for years.

**A DaVinci Resolve progress bar frozen at zero percent is not the same signal as a frozen application, even though they look identical on screen.** One is Resolve doing invisible work. The other is Resolve doing no work at all. Telling them apart takes thirty seconds, and it's the single most useful habit in this entire guide. That's the same lesson behind a Color page that looks empty instead of broken: our guide to [DaVinci Resolve's Color tab not showing footage](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-color-tab-not-showing-footage) walks through a different symptom driven by the identical instinct, assuming the worst before checking the obvious explanation first.

## How do you tell if Resolve is actually frozen or just working silently?

This is the diagnostic step to run before anything else in this guide, because it splits every stuck import into one of two completely different troubleshooting paths.

**On a Mac**, open Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities, or search with Spotlight), find DaVinci Resolve in the process list, and watch the % CPU and the Disk tab's read/write columns for a solid two minutes.

**On Windows**, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), find DaVinci Resolve under Processes, and watch the CPU and Disk columns the same way. Also check whether the title bar or the taskbar entry says "(Not Responding)," which Windows adds specifically when an app has stopped handling window messages.

| What you see | What it means | What to do |
| --- | --- | --- |
| CPU usage bouncing, disk read/write active, no "(Not Responding)" tag | Resolve is genuinely working, just on something invisible to the progress bar | Let it continue. Check back every few minutes rather than force quitting |
| CPU and disk both flat at or near zero for 2+ minutes | Resolve has genuinely hung | Force quit, then work through the causes below before retrying |
| CPU pegged at 100% on a single core, disk mostly idle | Software codec decode is the bottleneck | See the H.265/HEVC section below before assuming anything is broken |
| Disk activity high, CPU relatively low, especially on a network or external drive | The storage device itself is the bottleneck, not Resolve | See the drive and network sections below |

**A stuck-at-zero import with an active CPU or disk light underneath it will finish. A stuck-at-zero import with a flat, silent system underneath it will not.** That single check tells you whether you're about to spend the next ten minutes waiting productively or waiting for nothing.

## Is a cloud-sync placeholder file causing your import to hang?

This is, by a wide margin, the most common cause behind a stuck-at-zero import that shows zero disk activity and never recovers, and it has nothing to do with Resolve being broken.

iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox all offer some version of a storage-optimization feature, iCloud calls it Optimize Mac Storage, OneDrive calls it Files On-Demand, that replaces a local file with a small placeholder stub once the real file has finished uploading to the cloud. That placeholder carries the correct filename, the correct file size shown in Finder or Explorer, and often a correct-looking thumbnail. It holds none of the actual video data. According to [Microsoft's own Compatibility Cookbook documentation on placeholder files](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/placeholder-files), these files exist specifically to represent cloud content locally without the storage cost, and any application that tries to read the file's actual bytes directly, rather than going through the cloud client's own APIs, gets back a stub instead of real content.

Video editing apps are exactly the kind of application that trips over this. They open a file and start reading raw bytes to decode frames, not politely asking the sync client to hydrate the file first. Point Resolve at a placeholder, and it starts reading a file that's mostly empty, which produces exactly the symptom described here: an import that sits at 0 percent, with no CPU spike and no meaningful disk read, because there's essentially nothing to read yet.

**DaVinci Resolve reads a cloud-sync placeholder exactly like a corrupted file, because as far as the decoder is concerned, that is exactly what it is.** The fix isn't a Resolve setting. It's telling your sync client to keep the real file locally before Resolve ever touches it.

1. **On Mac**, right-click the file or folder in Finder and choose "Download Now" if it's in iCloud Drive, or find the equivalent "Always keep on this device" option for OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
2. **On Windows**, right-click the file or folder in File Explorer and, per [Microsoft's own support documentation on OneDrive Files On-Demand](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/save-disk-space-with-onedrive-files-on-demand-for-windows), choose "Always keep on this device" rather than leaving it as an online-only file.
3. **Confirm the download actually finished** before you import. A large ProRes or RAW file can take a while to pull down over a slow connection, and importing the moment you click "keep on this device" can catch it mid-download.
4. **Better still, keep active project media entirely outside any synced folder.** Move footage to a local, non-synced drive as your working location, and let cloud storage handle archival or delivery, not active editing.

This exact mechanism is why iPhone footage specifically trips this up so often too, since iCloud Photo Library applies the same optimization logic to your camera roll. If iPhone clips are also drifting out of sync or stuttering once they do finally import, that's usually a separate, frame-rate-driven problem, covered in full in our guide to [DaVinci Resolve's mixed frame rate timeline jitter](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-mixed-frame-rate-timeline-jittery).

## Is H.265, HEVC, or another heavy codec the real bottleneck?

If Activity Monitor or Task Manager shows one CPU core pegged near 100 percent while the import sits at 0 percent, you've found your answer, and it isn't a bug.

H.265 (HEVC) is dramatically more computationally expensive to decode than H.264 or an editing-native intermediate codec like ProRes or DNxHR, because it uses far more complex compression math to achieve smaller file sizes at the same visual quality. That tradeoff, smaller files at the cost of decode complexity, is exactly why phones and drones love it and exactly why editing software struggles with it.

DaVinci Resolve can offload H.265 decoding to dedicated hardware, your GPU or, on some Intel chips, a separate media engine, but only for specific combinations of bit depth and chroma subsampling. According to [Puget Systems' testing on H.264 and H.265 hardware decoding support in DaVinci Resolve Studio](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-davinci-resolve-studio-2122/), "Intel's Core processors have additional levels of hardware decoding for H.265 footage that aren't available from contemporary GPUs," which means the exact hardware you're running on changes what's actually accelerated, not just whether acceleration exists at all. Fall outside the supported combination, a less common chroma subsampling variant, an unusual bit depth, an older GPU, and Resolve falls back to decoding every single frame in software, using your CPU instead of dedicated decode hardware.

Peter Emery, writing for Puget Systems on [how to check whether your specific footage is actually being hardware-accelerated in DaVinci Resolve](https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2025/02/10/is-your-footage-hardware-accelerated-in-davinci-resolve/), lays out the practical test directly: there's no simple on-screen indicator that tells you which decode path Resolve chose, so you compare performance with hardware acceleration toggled on versus off. If **"your footage exports at roughly the same amount of time"** either way, that's your evidence the footage was never using hardware decoding in the first place, meaning it was always running the slower, CPU-bound software path.

**Software decoding a 4K H.265 file can take longer to open the first frame than editing an entire ProRes timeline, and Resolve's progress bar has no way to show you that difference.** A single 4K60 10-bit H.265 clip, especially from an action camera or drone shooting at a high bitrate, can genuinely sit at 0 percent for several minutes on a modest CPU before the import bar moves at all. That's not a hang. It's Resolve doing real, heavy work that happens to produce no visible feedback until it's done.

What to actually do about it:

1. **Give a single suspect clip more time before assuming it's stuck.** Five minutes on one high-bitrate H.265 file is not unreasonable on a laptop or an older desktop without a dedicated hardware decoder for that specific format.
2. **Check whether hardware decode is even enabled**, under DaVinci Resolve Preferences > Decode & Encode, and confirm your GPU driver is current, since decode support is frequently added or expanded in driver updates rather than in Resolve itself.
3. **Transcode ahead of time if this is a recurring problem**, not a one-off clip. Converting H.265 footage to ProRes or DNxHR before you bring it into a project trades disk space for editing speed, and it's the standard professional workaround for exactly this bottleneck, according to [Puget Systems' own hardware recommendations for DaVinci Resolve workstations](https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/davinci-resolve/hardware-recommendations/).
4. **Generate Optimized Media instead of transcoding by hand**, if you want Resolve to manage the lower-resolution working copies itself rather than maintaining separate transcoded originals. That process has its own set of stuck-at-zero causes, covered in its own section below.

## Is your Media Storage preference missing the drive entirely?

If the import sits at 0 percent with genuinely no CPU or disk activity, and the source drive is a secondary internal disk, an external SSD, or a NAS share rather than your system drive, check this before anything else.

DaVinci Resolve's Media Storage panel, found in Preferences, controls which volumes Resolve is actually willing to scan and read media from. According to [DaVinci Resolve's own manual](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part122.htm), automatic detection is enabled by default, letting Resolve "access media on all temporarily and permanently mounted volumes, including SATA and eSATA, SAS, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or GigE), Fibre Channel, and otherwise connected hard drives, without having to add them to this list." That covers most setups automatically. It doesn't cover every setup, and when automatic detection is off, or a specific mapped network location isn't recognized, the fix is adding it manually: right-click in the Media Storage volumes list and choose the option to add a new location, or map the drive directly if it's a network share.

A [Blackmagic Forum thread about DaVinci not finding any media at all](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=225864) documents the practical version of this trap: files that show up perfectly fine in Finder or Explorer, sit on a drive that's demonstrably connected and readable, and still refuse to import, drag, or even show a thumbnail inside Resolve, because that specific drive was never added to the Media Storage list Resolve actually trusts.

**A drive Resolve cannot see in Media Storage preferences might as well not exist, no matter how correctly it shows up in Finder or Explorer.** This produces a distinctive symptom worth knowing: instead of a slow crawl toward 1 percent, the import often just sits, completely inert, because Resolve isn't even attempting to read the file. There's no decode happening to spike your CPU, because Resolve never got that far.

The first Media Storage entry deserves special attention too, since it isn't just a browsing convenience. The manual is specific that the topmost volume in that list is where "Gallery stills and cache files are stored, so you want to make sure that you choose the fastest storage volume to which you have access." If that first entry points at a slow, nearly full, or disconnected drive, cache-dependent operations, including parts of the import pipeline, can stall waiting on a resource that isn't performing the way Resolve expects. Getting this list right also matters the next time you need to hand a project off or archive it, since our guide to [archiving a DaVinci Resolve project without losing media](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/how-to-archive-a-davinci-resolve-project-without-losing-media) walks through exactly which drives Resolve needs to see to copy every referenced file correctly.

If you're working with a mounted cloud project, Blackmagic Cloud or a similar remote-mount workflow, the storage-order rule matters even more. Frame.io's own guidance on [DaVinci Resolve mounted storage optimization](https://help.frame.io/en/articles/14442067-davinci-resolve-mounted-storage-optimization) is direct about this: "make sure the first path in the list is a local SSD, not a mounted Project," specifically because cache and temporary file operations need to hit local, fast storage rather than round-tripping through a network mount for every scratch write.

## Is antivirus or security software scanning the cache mid-import?

This one is almost entirely a Windows problem, and it's sneaky specifically because it looks identical to a genuine hang from inside Resolve's own window.

Real-time antivirus protection, Windows Defender chief among them, scans files as they're written to disk, which is exactly what DaVinci Resolve is doing constantly during an import: writing thumbnails, waveform caches, and, if enabled, proxy or optimized media files. According to [Vagon's breakdown of DaVinci Resolve crash causes by type](https://vagon.io/blog/davinci-resolve-crashes-and-fixes), Windows Defender "can freeze Resolve during a render by scanning a cache folder mid-export," and the identical mechanism applies during import, since both operations hammer the same cache directory with a stream of new small files that real-time scanning intercepts one at a time.

The practical result: Resolve's own process shows some CPU activity, since it's genuinely trying to write files, but progress stalls because every write gets held up behind a scan. This sits in an annoying middle ground between "clearly frozen" and "clearly working," which is exactly why it gets misdiagnosed so often as a Resolve bug rather than a security software conflict.

The fix is a standard, safe exclusion, not disabling protection system-wide:

1. Open Windows Security, Virus & threat protection, Manage settings, Exclusions.
2. Add folder exclusions for Resolve's cache location, your project's proxy and optimized media folders, and the drive holding your active media, not your entire system drive.
3. Leave real-time protection enabled everywhere else. This is a targeted exclusion for known high-churn folders, not a general security downgrade.

**Antivirus software scanning a cache folder mid-write doesn't crash Resolve outright. It just makes every write wait in line, which looks exactly like a hang from inside the app.** If you're on Windows and this stall pattern shows up specifically during imports, exports, or optimized media generation, and nowhere else, a cache exclusion is worth trying before any deeper troubleshooting.

## Is the drive itself the actual bottleneck?

Sometimes the file is real, the codec is fine, and the drive is still the problem, just not in a way Resolve can report clearly.

**Spinning-disk external drives that sleep.** A USB or Thunderbolt hard drive, as opposed to an SSD, can spin down after a period of inactivity to save power. The moment Resolve tries to read from it, there's a real, physical delay while the platters spin back up to speed, sometimes several seconds, occasionally longer on an older or failing drive. That delay reads as a stalled import, because from Resolve's perspective, it's simply waiting on a read request that hasn't returned yet.

**USB hubs sharing bandwidth across multiple devices.** Plugging your source drive into a hub alongside other peripherals splits the available bandwidth across everything connected. A drive that performs fine plugged in directly can stall noticeably when it's competing with three other devices on the same hub for the same USB controller's throughput.

**Network-attached storage over SMB, especially on Mac.** A [TrueNAS community discussion specifically about choppy Resolve playback with 4K 120fps footage from a NAS](https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/playback-in-davinci-choppy-bad-performance-editing-4k-120fps-video.114004/) raises exactly this question, and points at a real, documented pattern: SMB performance issues on Mac clients connecting to a NAS have been an ongoing area of active fixes on the NAS vendor side, not something fully resolved industry-wide. If your source footage lives on a network share rather than local or directly-attached storage, and the same footage imports fine when copied to a local drive first, the network protocol itself, not Resolve, not the file, is your bottleneck.

| Storage situation | What to check | What usually fixes it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| External spinning HDD | Does the drive's activity light take a few seconds to respond after you start the import? | Disable aggressive drive sleep settings, or switch to an SSD for active editing |
| USB hub with multiple devices | Does the import speed up when the drive is plugged directly into the computer? | Connect the source drive directly, not through a shared hub |
| NAS over SMB (especially Mac) | Does the same file import quickly when copied to a local drive first? | Update NAS firmware, or move active project media to local/direct-attached storage |
| Nearly full drive of any kind | Is there enough free space for cache and thumbnail writes, not just the source file itself? | Free up space; Resolve needs headroom beyond just the media size |

**A drive that reads perfectly fine for casual file browsing can still be too slow, too shared, or too far away over a network to keep up with what Resolve needs during import.** Finder or Explorer showing a file exists and is readable tells you almost nothing about whether it can sustain the read speed Resolve's decode pipeline actually needs.

## Is a long file path or an unusual filename blocking the import?

This one is almost entirely a Windows problem, and it's the kind of cause that produces no error message at all, just silence.

Windows imposes a legacy limit on total file path length for most applications: 260 characters, known as MAX_PATH, covering the drive letter, every folder in the chain, and the filename itself. [Microsoft's own developer documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation) confirms this limit still applies by default, and while Windows 10 and later support a Group Policy setting to raise it, "even if you have enabled the long path support in Windows, it doesn't guarantee that any app will correctly handle paths that exceed the default limit," since the application itself has to be built to support long paths explicitly.

A deeply nested project structure, Client folder, inside Project folder, inside Year folder, inside Footage Type folder, inside Camera Card folder, adds up fast, especially with long, descriptive folder and file names rather than short codes. Cross that 260-character line and Resolve can fail to even recognize the file exists, let alone import it, with nothing in the interface pointing specifically at path length as the cause.

A related, non-length trap shows up constantly in forum reports too: unusual characters in a folder or file name, accented letters, symbols, or, increasingly, emoji dropped into a folder name by a phone's default camera-roll naming or a hastily created project folder. One specific case worth knowing about directly: a user troubleshooting failed imports found the parent directory had an emoji in the folder name, and once removed, imports worked without needing to update the Resolve software at all.

**A file path that's too long or contains an unusual character doesn't produce a clear error in DaVinci Resolve. It produces exactly the same silent nothing as every other cause on this page**, which is why it's worth ruling out deliberately rather than waiting for Resolve to tell you.

1. Move the source media to a shorter, shallower folder path, close to the drive root rather than nested five folders deep.
2. Rename any file or folder using simple alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores only, no spaces, accented letters, symbols, or emoji.
3. If you're on a shared server path with a long UNC-style prefix, that alone can eat a large chunk of your 260-character budget before your actual folder names even start.

## Is a macOS permission block silently stopping the read?

On Mac, a stuck-at-zero import with genuinely flat CPU and disk activity often traces back to something that looks unrelated at first: a security prompt that either never appeared, or appeared once and was dismissed without being granted.

macOS gates access to certain locations, external volumes, removable drives, and folders outside an app's normal sandbox, behind explicit user permission. According to [Apple's own support documentation on changing file, folder, and disk permissions on Mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-permissions-for-files-folders-or-disks-mchlp1203/mac), access to protected locations is controlled through System Settings, Privacy & Security, and an app that hasn't been granted the right level of access simply can't read what it's asking for, often without a clear, persistent error dialog explaining why.

The practical trap: the first time Resolve tries to access a specific external drive, macOS may show a one-time permission prompt. Dismiss it, click the wrong button, or have it appear behind another window where you never see it, and Resolve is left trying to read a drive it doesn't have permission to touch, silently, forever, until someone manually fixes the permission.

The fix:

1. Open System Settings, Privacy & Security, Full Disk Access.
2. Confirm DaVinci Resolve appears in the list and its toggle is switched on. If it's missing, click the plus button and add it from your Applications folder.
3. If the toggle was already on, toggle it off and back on, then fully quit and reopen Resolve, since permission changes frequently don't take effect until the app restarts.
4. For a specific external drive that seems singled out, disconnect and reconnect it, and watch for a fresh permission prompt you may have missed the first time.

**A permission Resolve never received doesn't produce a permission error. It produces an import that goes nowhere, because as far as macOS is concerned, Resolve never gets far enough to fail loudly.** This is exactly the kind of cause that looks like a corrupted file or a broken drive until you check the one settings panel that actually explains it.

## Is it actually Generate Optimized Media or proxy generation that's stuck, not the import?

This mix-up happens constantly, and it's worth calling out on its own, because the fix is completely different from anything above.

If you have Resolve set to automatically generate optimized media or proxies on import, the progress bar you're staring at may not represent the import at all. It represents a background transcode job writing new files to your cache or proxy drive, and that job can stall for reasons that have nothing to do with your source footage being unreadable.

A long-documented [Blackmagic Forum thread about Generate Optimized Media getting stuck at 50 percent](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=53517) traces this specifically to cache drive problems: the process stalls when the CacheClip folder lacks free space, or when the wrong storage location is selected in Project Settings, and one fix that's worked for multiple users involves checking the Direct I/O setting on the cache drive specifically inside DaVinci Preferences, alongside simply switching to a different, faster cache drive when a RAID array or a specific SSD model turns out to be the bottleneck.

A more recent thread covering [proxy generation problems specifically with DJI Mini 4 Pro and GoPro footage](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=230474) reports proxies generating fine from either camera's footage separately, but stalling at 0 percent and requiring a full restart when clips from both sources are queued together in the same batch, a good illustration of how mixing footage from different codecs or camera profiles in one large proxy batch can trigger a stall that neither source alone would produce.

Even once optimized media finishes generating successfully, a separate, related trap can make it look like the whole system is broken. On the [Lowepost forum thread "Resolve not using the optimized media,"](https://lowepost.com/forums/topic/1507-resolve-not-using-the-optimized-media/) a user posting as Emil Öberg described the frustration plainly: **"No matter what quality I generate the optimized media in, there's no difference in the quality of the footage or playback,"** adding, **"In the timeline, only the original media is being played back."** Another user in the same thread, Willian Aleman, offered the fix that resolved it for several people: **"Delete Optimized Media. Then, from Media Pool: Generate Optimize Media,"** while noting candidly, **"It seems to be a bug in Resolve where at some point no matter from where or what optimization media we choose, it doesn't work."** Thomas Singh's simpler reminder is worth checking first, before assuming anything is broken: **"After you have generated the optimized media you need to hit 'use optimized media' from the playback menu on top,"** since a fully generated optimized media set does nothing for playback if that toggle in the Playback menu is switched off.

**Generating optimized media and importing media look identical from the progress bar's point of view, which is exactly why so many stuck-at-zero reports are actually stuck proxy jobs in disguise.** If your Resolve preferences have automatic proxy or optimized media generation switched on, that's the first thing to check, and the first thing to switch off temporarily, before you spend time chasing an import problem that isn't really an import problem at all. This same close-but-not-quite pattern, a symptom that looks like total failure but traces back to a stale cache or a disabled setting, shows up in a different form in our guide to [DaVinci Resolve's plugin not found and missing effect error](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-plugin-not-found-missing-effect), if you're troubleshooting a similarly stubborn-looking problem elsewhere in the same project.

What actually helps:

1. **Generate optimized media on a handful of clips at a time**, rather than selecting your entire bin and letting Resolve queue everything at once.
2. **Confirm your cache and optimized media drive has real free space**, not just enough to technically start the job.
3. **Check the Direct I/O checkbox** for your cache drive under DaVinci Resolve Preferences, Media Storage, particularly if you're on a RAID array or a specific brand of external SSD that's known to behave inconsistently with Resolve's default I/O mode.
4. **Turn off automatic optimized media or proxy generation temporarily** if you just need footage into your timeline quickly, and generate proxies deliberately, in smaller batches, once the pressure's off.

## Is a corrupt or partially transferred file the actual cause?

If everything else checks out, the drive is fast and local, the codec decodes fine on other clips, there's no cloud placeholder involved, and one specific file still refuses to move past 0 percent while every other file in the same batch imports normally, the file itself is the most likely remaining explanation.

**Interrupted transfers** are the most common version of this. A card copy that got unplugged early, a network transfer that dropped partway through, or a cloud download that never fully completed all leave behind a file that's the right size on disk in some cases, but structurally incomplete or corrupted internally. Resolve tries to read a valid container and header, finds something malformed partway through, and hangs trying to make sense of it rather than failing cleanly with an error.

**Variable frame rate files** cause a related but distinct stall. Some phone and action cameras record with a frame rate that drifts slightly from moment to moment rather than staying perfectly constant, and a file like that can take Resolve unusually long to fully analyze on import, since it has to work out timing information a normal constant-frame-rate file would state cleanly in its header. The free MediaInfo utility will tell you directly whether a suspect file's Frame Rate Mode reads Variable, which is worth checking before you spend more time on a file that may need transcoding to a constant frame rate rather than a longer import wait.

The fastest way to isolate this: remove the specific clip that was mid-import when the stall happened from your batch, and try importing everything else without it. If the rest of the batch imports normally and only that one file hangs, you've confirmed the file, not your system, is the problem, and re-transferring or re-transcoding that single clip is the actual fix, not a Resolve preference change.

**A single corrupt file can stall an entire batch import at 0 percent while every other clip in that same batch would import perfectly fine on its own.** This is why batch-testing one suspect clip in isolation is worth the extra few minutes before you start changing preferences that had nothing to do with the actual problem.

## Does this behave differently in collaboration mode or a shared project database?

Yes, and it's worth separating from a plain media import stall, because the mechanism, and the fix, are different.

DaVinci Resolve's Multi-User Collaboration mode and PostgreSQL-backed shared databases introduce a layer that doesn't exist in a single-user local project: a project server, or a shared database connection, that has to stay in sync while media gets added. A stall here can look identical to a media import hang from the user's chair, a frozen progress indicator, no obvious error, but the actual bottleneck is database or network communication, not codec decoding or drive speed.

A [Creative COW forum thread specifically about a Resolve project stuck at 100 percent loading](https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/resolve-project-loading-stuck-at-100-green/) illustrates exactly this category of problem, even though the stuck percentage in that report was 100 rather than 0. A user posting as Eric Lalicata described it plainly: **"This project will not open past the 100% green status window. Everything looks good but is just hangs."** The thread's troubleshooting, contributed by Marc Wielage among others, worked through opening the same project on multiple systems connected to the shared database, testing local disk databases against the server database, and ultimately recommending simplifying the project itself, splitting long timelines or dividing multi-timeline projects into smaller pieces, when a shared-database project hangs in a way a local one doesn't.

The lesson generalizes cleanly to media import specifically inside a collaborative project: if the identical footage imports normally into a fresh, local, non-collaborative project but consistently stalls inside your team's shared database project, the cause sits in the database layer or the network path to your project server, not in the media files themselves. Test that exact comparison, same clip, local project versus shared project, before assuming a codec or drive problem when your whole team is on Multi-User Collaboration.

**A stall inside a shared project database can wear the exact same symptoms as a media import hang, a frozen progress window and no error message, while the actual cause sits in an entirely different part of the system.** Isolating whether the problem follows the file (import it into a fresh local project) or the project (import a known-good file into the shared one) tells you which half of the system to keep troubleshooting.

## The full diagnostic decision table

Work through this top to bottom. Stop at the first row that matches what you're actually seeing.

| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| CPU active, disk active, no "(Not Responding)" tag | Resolve is genuinely working on something invisible to the progress bar | Wait; check back every few minutes rather than force quitting |
| Flat CPU and disk for 2+ minutes, no activity at all | Genuine hang, cloud placeholder, missing Media Storage entry, or permission block | Force quit, then check the specific causes below in order |
| One CPU core pegged near 100%, disk mostly idle | Software H.265/HEVC decode fallback | Give it time; transcode to ProRes/DNxHR or generate optimized media if recurring |
| Source lives in iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox | Cloud-sync placeholder file, not a real local file | Force the file to download and stay local before importing |
| Drive shows fine in Finder/Explorer but Resolve won't touch it | Drive missing from Media Storage preferences | Add the drive manually, or enable automatic volume detection |
| Stall specifically on Windows, cache folder churning | Real-time antivirus scanning the cache mid-write | Exclude Resolve's cache and proxy folders from real-time scanning |
| Import speeds up when the drive is moved off a NAS or a shared USB hub | Network or shared-bandwidth storage bottleneck | Use direct-attached or local storage for active editing |
| Deeply nested project folder, Windows only | 260-character MAX_PATH limit | Shorten the folder path; move media closer to the drive root |
| Filename with accents, symbols, or emoji | Unsupported characters in file or folder name | Rename using plain alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores |
| Mac only, drive worked before but not now | Permission revoked or never granted | Check System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access |
| Stall matches Generate Optimized Media or proxy generation, not raw import | Cache drive full, wrong Direct I/O setting, or oversized batch | Free cache space, check Direct I/O, generate in smaller batches |
| Only one specific clip stalls; rest of the batch imports fine | Corrupt or partially transferred file, or variable frame rate | Isolate and re-transfer or transcode that single file |
| Stall only inside a shared/collaborative project, not a fresh local one | Database or project server communication issue | Test the same file in a local project to confirm it follows the project, not the file |

## What does this look like on a real import, start to finish?

Here's how three of the most common versions of this actually play out, worked through the way you'd actually troubleshoot them.

**Scenario one: a wedding videographer imports iPhone footage the morning after a shoot.** The Camera Roll folder synced overnight through iCloud Photo Library with Optimize iPhone Storage turned on. Dragging the clips into Resolve, the import sits at 0 percent for over five minutes with Activity Monitor showing flat, idle CPU and disk usage the entire time. Force quitting and reopening changes nothing. Checking Finder, the files show correct thumbnails and sizes, but right-clicking one and choosing "Download Now" reveals it wasn't actually local at all, iCloud starts pulling the real file down at that point, taking another few minutes over a home connection. Once every clip shows as fully downloaded in Finder, the same drag-and-drop import completes in under thirty seconds.

**Scenario two: a documentary editor imports 4K H.265 drone footage on a three-year-old laptop.** The import bar sits at 0 percent, but Activity Monitor shows one CPU core pinned near 100 percent the whole time, no flat idle period at all. Recognizing the pattern from testing a shorter clip earlier that behaved the same way, the editor lets it run rather than force quitting, and it completes in just under four minutes for a single 90-second clip, confirming this is software decode load rather than a hang. Rather than repeating that wait for the rest of the card, the editor switches to Generate Optimized Media at a quarter resolution for the whole folder overnight, working from lower-resolution proxies the next morning instead of full-resolution H.265 originals during the edit.

**Scenario three: a small studio's shared Postgres project stalls specifically when a new editor tries to import footage into a collaborative timeline.** The same footage imports instantly into a fresh local test project on the same machine, ruling out the file, the codec, and the drive entirely. The studio's IT contact confirms the Postgres server had been silently running low on disk space for weeks, a completely separate problem from anything on the editor's own machine, and clearing space on the database server resolves every subsequent import across the whole team, not just the one editor who happened to notice first.

Three completely different root causes, and in every case, the fix that worked wasn't a guess. It followed directly from the diagnostic step at the top of this guide: checking whether the system underneath the frozen progress bar was actually active, and asking what kind of activity, or lack of it, that pointed toward.

## Does this behave differently on Mac, Windows, or Linux?

The underlying mechanisms, codec decode limits, cloud-sync placeholders, Media Storage preferences, are identical across platforms, since they're properties of DaVinci Resolve's own import pipeline and of the file systems and cloud services involved, not platform-specific Resolve behavior. What differs is which specific trap you're statistically more likely to hit.

**Windows** carries the heavier share of antivirus-related stalls, given Windows Defender's default real-time scanning, and the 260-character MAX_PATH limitation, which macOS and Linux simply don't impose in the same way. OneDrive's Files On-Demand feature, being a Microsoft product tightly integrated into Windows Explorer, also produces this exact placeholder problem more often on Windows than iCloud does on Mac, simply because OneDrive ships as a default, often silently-enabled feature on many Windows installs.

**Mac** carries the heavier share of permission-related stalls, given macOS's Full Disk Access and per-app folder permission model, along with SMB network share quirks that show up specifically on Mac clients connecting to certain NAS systems. iCloud Drive's Optimize Mac Storage feature is the direct Mac counterpart to OneDrive's placeholder problem on Windows.

**Linux**, with a much smaller share of DaVinci Resolve's overall user base and generally less exposure to consumer cloud-sync clients and consumer antivirus software, sees fewer reports of this specific stuck-at-zero pattern in practice, though the core codec-decode and drive-speed causes apply identically, since those are properties of the hardware and the file, not the operating system.

None of this means one platform is fundamentally more reliable for imports than another. It means the specific thing worth checking first differs depending on which system you're troubleshooting on, and starting with your platform's more common culprit saves real time over working through every cause in a fixed order regardless of context.

## Is this different in the free version versus DaVinci Resolve Studio?

No, not in any way that changes the troubleshooting in this guide. Media import, the Media Storage panel, codec decoding, and Generate Optimized Media all work identically in both the free version and Studio. None of the causes covered here, cloud placeholders, HEVC decode load, missing scratch disk entries, antivirus interference, path length limits, or permission blocks, are gated to one edition or the other.

Where Studio genuinely differs is in a few adjacent areas that can look related but aren't: Studio adds support for higher frame rates and resolutions in certain delivery contexts, additional noise reduction and Neural Engine tools that can affect playback and render performance downstream of import, and Multi-User Collaboration's full feature set, though the free version does support a limited form of collaboration with its own database requirements. If you're specifically troubleshooting a stall inside a shared collaborative project, confirm which collaboration mode you're actually running, since free-version and Studio-version collaboration setups can differ in exactly how the underlying database is configured, even though the import stall symptoms themselves look the same either way.

**The stuck-at-zero import problem this whole guide covers is not a Studio-versus-free issue.** Don't let an unrelated feature comparison send you down the path of assuming a $295 upgrade will fix an import stall it has no relationship to.

## How do you keep this from costing you an afternoon next time?

A handful of habits catch nearly everything in this guide before it turns into a support-forum search mid-edit.

- **Keep active project media off cloud-synced folders entirely.** Use iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox for archival and delivery, not as your working import source, and this entire category of stall disappears.
- **Run the two-minute Activity Monitor or Task Manager check before force-quitting anything.** It takes less time than restarting Resolve and re-attempting the same import blind.
- **Test one suspect clip alone before troubleshooting your whole system.** A single corrupt file or an unusually heavy codec often explains a stall that looks, at first glance, like a system-wide problem.
- **Confirm every active drive appears in Media Storage preferences**, especially after adding new external storage or reconfiguring a NAS, rather than assuming Resolve sees whatever your OS sees.
- **On Windows, exclude Resolve's cache folders from real-time antivirus scanning proactively**, rather than discovering the conflict mid-project.
- **Keep project folder paths short and plain**, especially on Windows, and especially on shared server volumes where a long UNC prefix eats into your path budget before your own folder names even start.

## What if you're new to Resolve and can't tell which cause applies to you?

If you're still fairly new to DaVinci Resolve, working through a table like the one above while your CPU fan spins and a client waits is a genuinely stressful way to learn the app's internals. That's a normal place to be. Import mechanics, cache behavior, and platform-specific storage quirks are some of the least intuitive corners of Resolve, and there's no single settings panel that explains all of it at once.

TryUncle is an AI tutor for DaVinci Resolve on macOS. Ask in plain words and Uncle points at the exact control on your screen. [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com/?utm_source=tryuncle&utm_medium=learn&utm_campaign=davinci-resolve-import-stuck-at-0-percent) watches your actual Resolve window live, so instead of matching your exact symptom against a table like this one, you can ask Uncle why a specific import is sitting at 0 percent while you're staring at it, and it looks at your Media Storage preferences, your Activity Monitor state, and your actual project to point at what's actually happening on your machine right now. That's a meaningfully different approach than a chat-based assistant guessing from a text description, or a general-purpose chatbot that has never seen your screen at all: Uncle sees the same frozen progress bar you do.

Uncle is a paid app, currently in founder pricing at $29.99 a month for early seats, and it's macOS only, so if you're on Windows or Linux, the diagnostic table above is your fastest path through this specific problem today. If you're comparing tools in this general category, most existing options, chat-based assistants like Sottocut or PremiereCopilot, or Q&A tools like heyeddie.ai and cutagent.ai, work by answering questions about Resolve in a separate chat window. **Guided troubleshooting inside Resolve beats guessing from a forum thread shot on someone else's footage.** TryUncle's approach leans into that directly: it watches your actual screen and points at the literal button or setting you need, live, inside the app you're already troubleshooting in, rather than asking you to translate a generic answer onto your own project.

## What's the fastest path to a fix?

Check Activity Monitor or Task Manager first, always, before touching a single preference. Real CPU or disk activity means wait, since Resolve is working on something the progress bar simply can't show you, especially a heavy H.265 file falling back to software decode. Flat, silent activity for more than a couple of minutes means something specific is blocking Resolve before it ever starts: a cloud-sync placeholder standing in for a real file, a drive missing from Media Storage preferences, antivirus software holding up cache writes, a permission Mac never granted, or a genuinely corrupt file hiding inside an otherwise normal batch.

Nine times out of ten, DaVinci Resolve isn't broken and your footage isn't corrupted. Either the file underneath the placeholder hasn't downloaded yet, the codec is asking more of your CPU than the progress bar knows how to express, or one setting, one folder path, one permission, is quietly standing between Resolve and the file it's trying to read. Match the exact symptom to the exact cause, and the fix is almost always a checkbox, a folder move, or a few minutes of patience, not a reinstall.

## FAQ

### Why does DaVinci Resolve's import progress bar stay at 0 percent for a long time?

Because the progress bar only updates once Resolve finishes a chunk of work it can measure, and several of the things it does before that point, reading a heavy codec's first frame, waiting on a cloud-sync placeholder to hydrate, or generating a thumbnail and waveform, produce no visible movement at all. The bar sitting at 0 percent usually means Resolve hasn't finished step one yet, not that it has stopped working.

### How can I tell if DaVinci Resolve is actually frozen or just working slowly?

Open Activity Monitor on Mac or Task Manager on Windows and watch Resolve's CPU and disk usage while the import sits at 0 percent. Real, ongoing CPU or disk activity means it's working, just slowly. Flat lines at zero for more than a minute or two, combined with the app showing (Not Responding) in Task Manager or a spinning wheel in Activity Monitor, mean it's genuinely hung and won't recover on its own.

### Why does importing footage from iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox get stuck at 0 percent?

Because those services replace local files with small placeholder stubs once they've synced to the cloud, to save disk space. The placeholder looks like a real file in Finder or Explorer, correct name, correct size, correct thumbnail, but it holds none of the actual video data until the service finishes downloading the original back down. Resolve tries to decode a file with nothing in it and hangs at 0 percent instead of failing outright. Mark the file or folder to always keep a local copy before you import it.

### Does H.265 or HEVC footage make DaVinci Resolve's import take longer than other formats?

Yes, often dramatically longer, if your system falls back to software decoding. H.265 is far more computationally expensive to unpack than H.264 or an intermediate codec like ProRes, and DaVinci Resolve can only use your GPU or CPU's dedicated hardware decoder for specific combinations of bit depth and chroma subsampling. Fall outside that supported combination and Resolve decodes every frame in software, which can leave an import sitting at 0 percent for minutes on a single high-bitrate 4K or 8K clip.

### Why does Generate Optimized Media or proxy generation get stuck instead of the actual import?

Because those two operations look identical from the progress bar's point of view, and it's easy to mistake one for the other. Optimized media and proxies write new transcoded files to your cache or proxy drive as a background job, and that job stalls for the same reasons an import does: a full or slow cache drive, a missing Direct I/O setting on the cache volume, or too many clips queued in a single batch. Generate optimized media on a handful of clips at a time instead of your whole bin, and confirm the cache drive actually has free space.

### Is a stuck import different on Windows versus Mac?

The underlying causes, codec decode load, cloud placeholders, a missing scratch disk entry, are identical on both platforms, but the specific traps differ. Windows users hit real-time antivirus scanning a cache folder mid-import and the 260-character MAX_PATH limit on deeply nested project folders far more often. Mac users hit the root-Library-versus-user-folder permission prompts and SMB network share slowdowns more often. Neither platform is inherently more reliable; the failure just wears a different disguise.

### What should I do if DaVinci Resolve is truly frozen with zero CPU or disk activity?

Give it two full minutes first, since a large batch import can have brief, genuine dead spots between files. If Task Manager or Activity Monitor still shows no CPU or disk activity after that, force quit the app rather than waiting longer, since a true hang with nothing happening underneath it won't resolve itself. Restart Resolve, remove the single clip you were importing when it happened from the batch, and try the rest first to isolate whether one specific file is the trigger before touching any preference.

## Sources

- [Creative COW Forum - Resolve project loading stuck at 100% green](https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/resolve-project-loading-stuck-at-100-green/)
- [Lowepost Forum - Resolve not using the optimized media](https://lowepost.com/forums/topic/1507-resolve-not-using-the-optimized-media/)
- [Puget Systems - Is Your Footage Hardware Accelerated in DaVinci Resolve? (Peter Emery)](https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2025/02/10/is-your-footage-hardware-accelerated-in-davinci-resolve/)
- [Puget Systems - What H.264 and H.265 Hardware Decoding is Supported in DaVinci Resolve Studio?](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-davinci-resolve-studio-2122/)
- [Puget Systems - Hardware Recommendations for DaVinci Resolve](https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/davinci-resolve/hardware-recommendations/)
- [DaVinci Resolve Manual - Media Storage (Blackmagic Design, mirrored)](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part122.htm)
- [Frame.io Help Center - DaVinci Resolve / Mounted Storage Optimization](https://help.frame.io/en/articles/14442067-davinci-resolve-mounted-storage-optimization)
- [Blackmagic Forum - Problem Generating Proxy Media (DJI Mini 4 Pro and GoPro)](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=230474)
- [Blackmagic Forum - Generate Optimized Media Stuck @ 50% (Resolve 12.5.3)](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=53517)
- [Blackmagic Forum - Davinci can't find media (any of it)](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=225864)
- [Vagon - DaVinci Resolve Keeps Crashing? Common Causes and Fixes by Crash Type](https://vagon.io/blog/davinci-resolve-crashes-and-fixes)
- [Microsoft Learn - Maximum Path Length Limitation (Win32 apps)](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation)
- [Microsoft Support - Save disk space with OneDrive Files On-Demand for Windows](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/save-disk-space-with-onedrive-files-on-demand-for-windows)
- [Microsoft Learn - Placeholder files, Compatibility Cookbook](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/placeholder-files)
- [Apple Support - Change permissions for files, folders, or disks on Mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-permissions-for-files-folders-or-disks-mchlp1203/mac)
- [TrueNAS Community - Playback in Davinci choppy, bad performance editing 4K 120fps video](https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/playback-in-davinci-choppy-bad-performance-editing-4k-120fps-video.114004/)