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What Is Media Management in DaVinci Resolve?
If you’ve edited a program within DaVinci Resolve, you can use the Media Management command to take care of a variety of tasks, including but not limited to:
— Creating a duplicate of your project’s clips that eliminates unused media in preparation for handing the media off to another facility.
— Transcoding all clips in a timeline to another format while eliminating unused heads and tails.
For example, if you’re preparing to export a project to hand off to another DaVinci Resolve user somewhere else, or even an XML or AAF to give to someone using a completely different NLE or finishing application, you can use Media Management in DaVinci Resolve to consolidate and relink the media used by the timeline you’re handing off, so the exported project or timeline references a smaller set of media.
Even if you’re not handing a project off, if you’ve ingested an enormous amount of source media into a project, and after the majority of the editing decide that you want to create a consolidated set of the media you’re using in order to lighten the project’s load in the Media Pool, you can create a duplicate of the media to reconform to, omitting unused clips and trimming the unused heads and tails of the clips you are using in the process.
But Media Management isn’t just useful for projects you’ve edited in DaVinci Resolve. For example, if you’re importing a project from another application and you’ve been given an enormous amount of source media to conform to, you may be hesitant to copy all of it to your accelerated storage volume, since (a) most of it is probably unused by the project file you’ve been given, (b) it’ll take forever to copy from the cheap USB 2 hard drive they’ve given you, and (c) it will clog up your local storage, taking valuable space away from other projects. In this case, you can use the Media Management to copy a reduced set of media files consisting of only the clips used in the current timeline of the Edit page.
Media Management of Timelines Creates .drt Files
When performing Media Management operations to copy or transcode media from a timeline, a DaVinci Resolve Timeline (.drt) file is automatically created in the same bin as the resulting media files, linked to the newly created media. This timeline can then be imported into the same or a new DaVinci Resolve project.