DaVinci Resolve Timeline Track Height Won't Change? The Fix

Did an open keyframe editor expand the track without you asking?

This cause runs in the opposite direction from the one above. Instead of a track refusing to shrink or grow when you want it to, a track grows on its own, seemingly out of nowhere, and it can look exactly like a stuck resize if you don't know what triggered it.

On a Creative COW forum thread titled "Reducing super annoying track height for text clips?", an editor named Ben Singer described exactly this experience: two of his text clip tracks had become, in his words, "ridiculously tall," with an expanded area beneath the clips that appeared to hold nothing useful. He tracked down the cause himself and reported back: "The darkened spots under two of the text clips reflected that I had clicked on the 'keyframe' icon that is on the bottom of each clip."

Michael Gissing, another contributor on that same thread, explained why the height change happens at all rather than treating it as a bug: "It is the keyframe editor so you need the scale to be able to manipulate keyframe values." The extra vertical space isn't wasted. It's the room DaVinci Resolve needs to draw the keyframe curve you're about to adjust, and the track has to physically grow to make space for it.

An open keyframe editor can make a track taller than every setting in Timeline View Options combined. That's worth internalizing, because no amount of adjusting the height slider or checking Lock Track Height To fixes this specific cause. The track isn't locked. It's doing exactly what a keyframe editor is supposed to do, and it stays that size for as long as the editor stays open.

Tom Watson, replying on the same thread, described the practical workflow for living with this rather than fighting it: "I make the key frame adjustment, then click the icon again and it shrinks back to normal size. Bring it up when you need it, then make it go away until you need it again." Click the same small keyframe icon at the bottom of the clip a second time, and the track collapses back to whatever height it was before, no menu required.

If you've been hunting through Lock Track Height To or the Timeline View Options sliders trying to shrink a single clip's track back down, and every other track on the timeline behaves normally, look at that clip specifically for an active keyframe icon before you touch anything global. It's a far more common explanation than a broken setting.

Are you using the right method for what you're actually trying to do?

DaVinci Resolve gives you three separate ways to change track height, and a decent share of "it won't change" reports turn out to be someone using the correct method in the wrong situation, or expecting one method to do a different method's job.

Per the manual's description of modifying timeline tracks, you can resize an individual track by "dragging its top border in the Track Header," which changes exactly that one track and nothing else. A separate Blackmagic forum thread on resizing timeline height in the Edit page confirms the same three-method structure editors have relied on since the option expanded: the Timeline View Options menu, Shift plus the mouse wheel anywhere over a track, or dragging directly on the track header border.

Each method has a different scope, and picking the wrong one for what you're trying to accomplish is the second most common reason people think a track is stuck when it isn't.

The manual also confirms something worth knowing before you conclude a slider is broken: "Now you can freely change track height no matter what options you've chosen, and resizing one or more tracks below the minimum height for filmstrips or thumbnails automatically collapses those tracks into Simple view to avoid clutter." That's not a bug either. If you drag a track down small enough, it switches to a simplified, thumbnail-free view rather than continuing to shrink into an unusable sliver, and that automatic switch can look like the resize "stopped working" when it actually just changed display mode at the floor of its range.

A separate, older complaint on the Blackmagic forum, "large space between V1 and V2," describes a related confusion: deleting a clip left an unexpectedly large gap between two video tracks that looked like a height problem but wasn't one at all, it was leftover vertical space from the deletion. The fix there was the same drag-the-border method, or opening Timeline View Options and adjusting the video height sliders directly, since the visible gap responded to the same controls as an intentional resize would.

If you've been trying Shift+scroll expecting it to resize every track on the timeline at once, and it's only touching the single track your cursor happens to be over, that's expected behavior, not a partial failure. Reach for the Timeline View Options sliders instead when you want a category-wide change.

Is a dual-monitor bug blocking the drag cursor?

Rarer than the causes above, but real, and specific enough that it's worth naming directly if the previous sections didn't match your symptom.

A Blackmagic forum thread titled "Cant adjust timeline display height" describes exactly this: an editor working across dual monitors found that hovering over the resize boundary correctly changed the cursor to the adjustment icon, confirming Resolve recognized the mouse was in the right spot, but dragging from there did nothing. The height simply refused to move, even though every visual signal suggested the drag should work.

The fix that resolved it for that editor was going to Workspace, then Reset UI Layout, and reorganizing the displays afterward. Per the DaVinci Resolve reference manual's own description of that menu option, Reset UI Layout brings "all your windows back to the center" and rebuilds the current page's layout for your screen's actual resolution and arrangement. In a dual-monitor setup specifically, that rebuild appears to clear whatever internal state was preventing the drag from registering, even though the visible cursor had looked correct the whole time.

This is a narrow, specific fix, so it's worth confirming the symptom actually matches before you jump to it. If your cursor doesn't change to a resize icon at all when you hover the track boundary, that's a different problem, most likely Lock Track Height To, not this one. This fix is specifically for the case where the cursor looks right and the drag itself is the part that fails.

Why doesn't your track height carry over to a new project or session?

This isn't a bug at all, but it's one of the most common reasons people believe their setting "won't stick," so it belongs in this guide even though the fix is really an expectation reset rather than a technical one.

A Blackmagic forum thread titled "Timeline track height/orientation never seems to stick" captures the exact frustration: editors set a preferred track height, close the project or restart Resolve, and come back to find it reverted. Related threads, "How to save track heights?", "Track height keeps resetting," and "How reset track heights to where you had them?", all describe versions of the same complaint across different Resolve releases, which tells you this isn't a one-off glitch, it's a consistent piece of how the software is designed to work.

DaVinci Resolve saves track height per timeline, inside the project. It doesn't save it as part of a Workspace. That's the core fact worth understanding. A Workspace layout preset, saved through Workspace, Layout Presets, Save Layout as Preset, remembers your panel arrangement: where the Media Pool sits, whether the Inspector is open, how wide the Effects Library is. It does a much less reliable job of remembering individual track heights, since those are tied to the specific timeline you were viewing when you set them, not to the workspace shell around it.

Practically, this means:

• A track height you set on Timeline A in Project X has no guaranteed relationship to Timeline B in that same project, even though both live in the same file.
• Opening a brand-new project starts you back at whatever the default track height is for a fresh timeline, regardless of what you'd customized in a previous project.
• A "Reset ALL Audio or Video Tracks height at once?" style request, which shows up as its own forum thread, reflects how tedious it is to manually reset several tracks back to a shared height one at a time, since there isn't a single command that resets every track on a timeline in one click.

If your workflow depends on a specific track height every time you open a new project, the practical fix isn't a hidden setting, it's a habit: build a template project with your preferred track heights already set, and duplicate that template instead of starting from Resolve's default new-project state each time. It's not elegant, but it's the approach several editors on these threads describe settling on once they understood the height wasn't going to persist any other way.

Is the audio track height limit actually a Fairlight problem in disguise?

Sometimes the track isn't stuck at all. It's exactly as tall as the Edit page timeline is ever going to let it get, and the real fix is switching pages, not fighting a slider.

On the Creative COW forum, an editor named Jason Jones asked a version of this question directly: "is there some hidden method of making audio clips higher in the Timeline?" He'd already pushed the Audio Track Height setting in Timeline View Options as far as it would go, and the waveforms were still too small to work with precisely.

Michael Gissing answered with the actual fix, and it wasn't a hidden setting inside the Edit page at all: "If you need to get into waveforms and serious audio editing use the Fairlight page and make the tracks as big as you need." Jones accepted this, noting he hadn't explored Fairlight yet but that the logic made sense for detailed audio work.

The fix for an audio track that stays short no matter how far you push the height slider isn't a bigger slider. It's the Fairlight page. The Edit page's timeline is built to give you a usable overview of picture and sound together, and its audio track height has a practical ceiling that reflects that job. Fairlight's own timeline exists specifically for detailed audio work, and its tracks scale far larger, since reading a waveform accurately for editing or mixing is the entire point of that page.

If you spend meaningful time doing dialogue cleanup, precise waveform trimming, or serious mixing, our guide to mixing audio in DaVinci Resolve using Fairlight covers building out that page properly, buses and all, rather than trying to force the Edit page timeline into a job it was never sized for.

Does a locked track (the padlock icon) block height changes?

No, and this deserves its own section because it's a genuinely easy mistake, especially once you already know Lock Track Height To exists and the two names start to blur together in your head.

The padlock icon on a track header is a completely different feature from Lock Track Height To. It blocks edits: you can't trim, move, delete, or drop new clips onto a padlocked track. It says nothing whatsoever about that track's height. A fully padlocked timeline, every track locked against edits, still resizes exactly the same as an unlocked one, assuming Lock Track Height To isn't separately set on any of those tracks.

If you've been toggling the padlock on every track trying to fix a stuck height, that's wasted effort, and it's worth unlocking anything you locked during that troubleshooting pass before you keep editing, since a track you forgot was locked against edits causes its own separate confusion down the line. The setting you actually want, if a height genuinely won't budge, is the right-click Lock Track Height To submenu covered earlier in this guide, not the padlock.

Can you reset every track's height at once?

Not in a single dedicated command, and this is a real, acknowledged gap rather than something you're missing in a menu somewhere. A Blackmagic forum thread titled "Reset ALL Audio or Video Tracks height at once?" captures editors asking for exactly this and not finding a built-in one-click answer.

What does work, in order of how much of your timeline it affects:

1. Select multiple tracks, then use Lock Track Height To. Selecting several tracks at once and choosing a size from that submenu applies it to all of them simultaneously, per the manual's own description, which is the closest thing to a batch reset available today. It sets a fixed size rather than "resetting to default," but it gets every selected track to a matching height in one action.
2. Use the Timeline View Options video and audio height sliders. These move every unlocked track of that type together, so if only a few tracks are individually locked and the rest are fine, adjusting the slider handles the bulk of the work in one motion, and you only need to manually fix the locked exceptions afterward.
3. Reset UI Layout, as a last resort for a genuinely broken display, not a batch height tool. This clears layout-level display bugs, including the dual-monitor drag issue covered earlier, but it doesn't reset every track's height to a specific value the way people asking this question usually want. Don't reach for it expecting a height reset; reach for it when the layout itself, not just one number, looks wrong.

If you're managing a project with a dozen or more tracks and you want them all at a consistent height going forward, doing the batch selection through Lock Track Height To once, at the start of your session, saves you from repeating this exercise every time a new track gets added at a mismatched size.

Does track height behave differently on Cut, Edit, Color, and Fairlight?

Yes, and worth testing separately if you're troubleshooting a symptom you only noticed on one page and assumed applied everywhere.

Our Cut page vs Edit page comparison covers the structural split between those two pages in depth, but the piece that matters here directly: the Cut page's dual timeline doesn't expose the same track height controls as the Edit page's full track stack, since the Cut page is built around a source tape and a simplified timeline rather than a detailed multi-track view. If you're looking for Lock Track Height To on the Cut page and can't find it, that's not a bug, it's a control that only exists in that form on Edit.

The Color page's timeline strip along the bottom of the screen inherits the same track data as the Edit page, but it's a thinner, purpose-built view for scrubbing through your grade, not for detailed track management, and it doesn't expose the same right-click height menu in the same way.

Fairlight, as covered above, goes the opposite direction: its tracks are built to grow far taller than anything the Edit page allows, because detailed audio work is the entire job of that page.

Test the exact same track on each page you use before concluding your whole project has a height problem. A fix that works on Edit but doesn't carry over to how the track looks on Color is expected, not evidence of something broken.

Is there a keyboard shortcut for track height, and should you ask for one?

Not by default, and if you've gone looking for one and come up empty, you're not missing something that's actually there.

Per the manual's description of modifying timeline tracks, "Keyboard Shortcuts can be assigned for track header context menu actions to add, delete, move, change color, and link tracks." That's a real, documented list, and track height doesn't appear on it. A Blackmagic forum thread titled "Edit page > Track Height(s) assignable keyboard shortcuts" shows editors specifically requesting this as a missing feature, which is a reasonable ask given how often track height gets adjusted during a normal editing session, but it's not something the current keyboard customization system covers.

In practice, that leaves you with the same three built-in methods covered earlier in this guide: dragging a track header's border, Shift plus the scroll wheel, and the Timeline View Options sliders. None of them require you to leave the mouse for very long, which is likely part of why a dedicated keyboard shortcut hasn't been a high priority for Blackmagic to add, even though editors keep asking.

If a fast, muscle-memory way to jump between two or three preferred track heights would genuinely speed up your workflow, the honest move right now is filing that request with Blackmagic directly rather than hunting for a shortcut that doesn't currently exist, since forum requests like the one above are exactly how features like Lock Track Height To itself likely got prioritized in the first place.

What does the full diagnosis look like on a real setup?

Put the pieces together on a common case: an editor working in DaVinci Resolve 21 on a multicam interview project with six video tracks, four of them holding different camera angles and two holding lower-third graphics, and a dozen audio tracks split across dialogue, room tone, and music.

The complaint: the two lower-third graphics tracks won't shrink no matter what's tried, while every camera angle track resizes normally with Shift+scroll.

Working the table from the top of this guide in order: first, right-click one of the stuck graphics tracks. Lock Track Height To shows Medium, not None. That single check explains everything. A previous session, working on the same project weeks earlier, had selected both graphics tracks together and locked them at Medium specifically so they'd stay visually consistent and out of the way while trimming was happening on the camera tracks below.

Setting Lock Track Height To back to None on both tracks immediately restores normal Shift+scroll behavior, no other change required. Total time from "these two tracks are broken" to "everything works exactly as documented": under two minutes, and the fix required editing exactly one setting, twice, in a menu the editor hadn't opened since the day they'd originally locked those tracks.

A second, smaller issue turns up during the same session: one dialogue track keeps looking taller than the rest whenever a specific clip is selected. That's the keyframe editor cause covered earlier, not a separate bug, confirmed by clicking that clip's keyframe icon and watching the track collapse back to normal the moment it's toggled off.

That's the pattern behind nearly every version of this complaint. The fix is almost never a corrupted project. It's almost always one setting, in one of a small number of specific places, that nobody had a reason to revisit until today.

Does the cause differ between Mac and Windows?

Mostly not, and that's worth stating plainly, since track height in DaVinci Resolve is almost entirely a project and UI-state issue rather than a platform-driven one.

Lock Track Height To, the keyframe editor's automatic expansion, and the per-project save behavior all work identically on Mac and Windows, since they're part of Resolve's own timeline logic rather than anything tied to the operating system underneath. The modifier key for the scroll-wheel resize method is the one small difference worth knowing: Shift+scroll is Shift on both platforms, unlike some of Resolve's other timeline shortcuts that swap Option for Alt or Command for Control between Mac and Windows. You don't need to relearn anything here switching platforms.

The dual-monitor drag cursor bug covered earlier was reported specifically in a Windows dual-display setup, and multi-monitor window and panel positioning bugs, generally, tend to show up more often on Windows, where laptop-plus-dock configurations that connect and disconnect throughout the day are more common in typical edit environments. That doesn't mean the bug can't happen on a Mac with two displays, only that it's been reported more frequently on Windows so far.

Is this a known bug tied to your DaVinci Resolve version?

Rarely, and not for this exact symptom as far as the current release notes show, though it's worth checking your version before you assume you're stuck with the problem indefinitely.

DaVinci Resolve 21.0.3, released on July 21, 2026, brought a batch of fixes according to coverage from Newsshooter covering the release, including a new legacy speed mode retime curve option, configurable keyframe ease actions, and a fix addressing an issue with pasting keyframes to linked audio clips, alongside general performance and stability improvements. None of those line items specifically mention track height or the Lock Track Height To submenu, so don't read this release as confirmation your exact problem has already been patched.

What a steady release cadence does tell you is practical: Blackmagic ships fixes to timeline and keyframe-adjacent behavior regularly, at roughly a monthly pace across 21.0.1, 21.0.2, and 21.0.3 so far. If your track height issue doesn't match any cause covered in this guide, updating to the newest point release is a reasonable next step before assuming you've found a genuine, unreported bug.

Reset UI Layout fixes a broken window arrangement. It does not reset a track's Lock Track Height To setting or clear an open keyframe editor. Keep that distinction in mind if you're debating whether your specific case is a version-level bug worth waiting out, or one of the causes covered earlier that you can fix yourself right now, in the menu it actually lives in.

What if nothing here fixes it?

Rare, but it happens, and at that point the remaining causes sit slightly outside the specific track-height mechanics covered so far.

1. Fully quit and relaunch DaVinci Resolve, not just close the project. A stuck internal state, though uncommon, doesn't always clear through UI navigation alone, and a full relaunch costs nothing before a deeper reset.
2. Test in a brand-new, empty project. If a fresh project's tracks resize normally and only your original project's tracks are stuck, the cause is specific to that project's saved timeline state, not your Resolve installation.
3. Duplicate the affected timeline. Right-click it in the Media Pool and choose Duplicate Timeline. Occasionally a stuck height clears on the duplicate even though it contains identical content, since the duplicate starts from a cleaner internal object.
4. Reset UI Layout from the Workspace menu, understanding this addresses display-level bugs like the dual-monitor cursor issue, not a Lock Track Height To setting or an open keyframe editor.
5. Update to the newest DaVinci Resolve 21 point release, especially if the problem started right after your last update.
6. Contact Blackmagic Design support directly with your exact OS version, Resolve version, and a description of exactly which resize method you tried and what happened. If you've ruled out every cause on this page, you may have found a genuine edge-case worth reporting.

What's the fastest thing to try first?

Work through these in order before you assume anything about your project is actually broken:

1. Right-click the stuck track's header and check Lock Track Height To. If it's set to anything but None, set it back to None.
2. If only one clip's track looks tall, click that clip's keyframe icon again to collapse it.
3. Confirm you're using the right method for the scope you want: drag the track header border for one track, Shift+scroll for a quick nudge, or the Timeline View Options sliders for every unlocked track of that type at once.
4. Open a brand-new empty project and test the same resize, to isolate a project-specific cause from a global one.
5. If the resize cursor appears correctly but dragging does nothing, try Workspace, Reset UI Layout, especially on a dual-monitor setup.
6. If this is really about seeing audio waveforms clearly, stop pushing the Edit page's Audio Track Height slider and open the Fairlight page instead.
7. Remember that track height saves per project, not per Workspace, so a fresh project starting at a default height isn't a bug.
8. Update to the newest DaVinci Resolve 21 point release if the problem started right after an update.

If digging through a right-click submenu you'd never opened before, just to find the one setting quietly blocking your track, ate more of your afternoon than it should have, that's exactly the kind of friction TryUncle is built for. TryUncle is the on-screen assistant for DaVinci Resolve on macOS. Ask in plain words and Uncle points at the exact control on your screen, instead of you cross-referencing a forum thread against a menu you've never needed before. It's a paid app, currently at founder pricing, and it's macOS only, so check TryUncle for the current rate if a live, on-screen pointer sounds more useful to you than another round of menu-hunting.

Most people land on step one or step two. The track isn't broken and the project isn't corrupted. Somewhere in a right-click menu, or on the bottom edge of a single clip, DaVinci Resolve is holding that track exactly where it was told to, on purpose, and it just never told you why. Find that one setting, and the track moves again like nothing was ever wrong.