User Manual

Generate Optimized Media
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.
To create optimized media:
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 6, “Improving
Performance, Proxies, and the Render Cache.”
Relink Selected Clips
DaVinci Resolve attempts to automatically keep track of the relationship between clips in your
project and their corresponding source media on disk. If, for whatever reason, source media
that links to clips in your project becomes unavailable because it’s been moved,
DaVinci Resolve has several different methods of relinking those clips in the Media Pool. This
section summarizes the primary method of relinking, the “Relink selected clips” command.
For more information on other methods of conforming projects and relinking media, see
Chapter 47, “Conforming and Relinking Clips.”
The appropriately named “Relink selected clips” command is the most flexible method of
relinking clips in your project with clips in a directory of your choice, using file name and
timecode as the primary criteria for reconnecting the relationship between each clip and its
corresponding media file on disk.
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