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If you’re editing processor-intensive source formats such as camera raw, H.264, or 8K media, and your computer isn’t fast enough to work with it easily in real time, you can create pre-rendered, low- overhead duplicate media to use instead, that’s automatically managed alongside the original media. This is called “Optimized Media.” Optimized Media lets you work more quickly by allowing you to edit with a more processor-efficient media format and resolution, while providing the ability to easily switch your project back to the original source media whenever you want. So, you can use optimized media to edit, and switch back to the original source media when it’s time to finish and output.
Switching is as easy as choosing Playback > Use Optimized Media if Available to toggle optimized media on and off.
DaVinci Resolve automatically manages the relationship between source clips and the optimized media you create, so all you need to do is choose which clips to make optimized media for.
For example, if you’re editing a project that consists of half camera raw media, and half DNxHD media, you only need to optimize the camera raw media, so you can use the search field to find all the raw clips you’ve imported based on Resolution, Codec, File Name, or whatever other metadata is appropriate.
1 Select one or more clips in the Media Pool that would benefit from being optimized.
2 Right-click one of the selected clips, and choose Generate Optimized Media from the contextual menu.
By default, all optimized media is written to the same directory as the cache files are written, which defaults to the first scratch disk listed in the Preference dialog’s Media Storage panel. The location of cache and optimized files is also selectable via the “Cache files location” setting in the Master Settings panel of the Project Settings.
Once you’ve created optimized media, all you need to do to use it is to choose Playback > Use Optimized Media if Available to toggle optimized media on and off.
For more information on choosing which format to optimize to, creating and managing optimized media, and how optimized media interacts with raw media, see Chapter 8, “Improving Performance, Proxies, and the Render Cache.”