User Manual

Preparing to Move Your Project
to DaVinci Resolve
When you’re preparing to move a project from another NLE to DaVinci Resolve, there are a few
steps you can take to make your work more organized.
Move Clips to the Lowest Video Track
Editors often use the multiple tracks NLEs offer for simple clip organization in the edit of a
scene. While this is convenient for offline editorial, it is less convenient when you’re trying to
conform, grade, finish, and render the media used by a project as quickly and efficiently
as possible.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to move all clips that are not stacked or superimposed as part
of a compositing operation down to track V1 of the Timeline in your NLE. This produces a
simplified edit that has many advantages. The project becomes smaller to move because
there’s less media in the Timeline, and consequently becomes faster to render. Furthermore,
the colorist is spared confusion because this eliminates “hidden” media that is nonetheless
connected to other clips that can be seen.
It’s also helpful, once you’ve reorganized the Timeline, to eliminate any empty tracks that are
left. This can be done from within DaVinci Resolve, but doing it in your NLE further simplifies the
project import process.
Organize Unsupported Media Files
Depending on your workflow and on the NLE you’re working with, there may be clips using
formats that are unsupported in DaVinci Resolve. Unsupported generators, media formats, and
other effects constructs may simply not be seen in DaVinci Resolve, and will consequently
appear as unlinked clips.
If you know this in advance, you can move all such clips into dedicated tracks where they can
be isolated, and the track can be turned off to hide the unsupported clips, simplifying timeline
navigation. This also saves the colorist from the need to worry about why there are offline clips
in the Timeline at 3 o’clock in the morning, immediately before starting a render.
Creating an Offline Reference Movie
Even though the colorist in any given workflow is likely to be building new grades from scratch,
it can be valuable to have a reference movie showing any color corrections, filters, or effects
that the offline editor applied during the editing process. This offline reference can be imported
into a DaVinci Resolve project, and used as a split-screen reference whenever there’s some
question about a look or effect from the offline edit.
Offline reference movies also serve as a useful tool when conforming a project in the Edit page.
After project conform, you can compare the project as seen in the Record Viewer with the
synchronized offline movie as seen in the Source Viewer set to Offline mode. This makes it
easy to scrub through a project to make sure that each clip has imported correctly and
is in sync.
More information about using offline reference movies appears later in this chapter.
Chapter – 46 Preparing Timelines for Import and Comparison 883