Have you ever tried to clean up your project? Remove all the clips that are not used anywhere? How many times did you have a 10 minute clip that was used only for 2 seconds in the final edit because a camera was recording all the time and now the clip takes gigabytes of your hard-drive? I guess more often than you think.

What would you say if I told you there’s a tool that can make all the maintenance for you and it’s right there in DaVinci Resolve?

I would say “AWESOME”!

Common uses

The most common scenario when Media Management tool is used is when the client brings the edited project on the portable device. What we need to do is import the timeline from the XML and then Resolve can help us:

• copy only the files that are used in the timeline
• trim the clips with a specified frame handles
• transcode to a different format/codec

Another use that I find pretty convenient is archiving the projects. Oftentimes some old projects can be trimmed/transcoded and a lot of space can be saved. Especially when we copied all the clips and without trimming originally.

Trimming

Unfortunately not all the codecs are fully supported and formats like H.264 cannot be trimmed. When such clips are used and trimming option is selected then the whole clip will be moved/copied to the output directory as is.

Using Media Management

To open the Media Management window navigate to File / Media Management:

When the Media Management window appears we have a few sections there:

The top section defines the scope of the media that will be affected by all the operations in the module. We can consolidate all the clips in the whole project, selected timelines or only selected clips (the clips have to be selected prior to opening the Media Management window).

In the next section we can select one of the following operations:

In all cases we can choose if all the clips will be copied/moved/transcoded or just the ones used in the timelines. We can also add frame handles for further edit adjustments.

Resolve gives us the option to preserve the directory structure in the output folder as well as relinking to the newly created/moved clips.

Transcode section offers variety of formats and codecs to choose from:

Following formats are supported:

• AVI
• Cineon
• DPX
• EXR
• easyDCP
• JPEG 2000
• MXF OP-Atom
• MXF OP1A
• QuickTime
• TIFF

In the last section of the window we can see in the estimated size of the project after the operation is complete.

Relinking Issues

From my tests it seems that relinking to the new media doesn’t have immediate effect. Choosing Show in Finder points to the old files. Restarting DaVinci Resolve fixes the issue though.

Summary

Version 12 of Resolve brings new functionality in a completely new user interface and a range of new possibilities. Media Management module seems to be working pretty nicely compared to the similar feature in Premiere Pro which failed for me so many times so that I don’t ever use it anymore.

Media Management can drastically reduce the space required by the projects and speed up the process of transferring the projects and archiving them.