User Manual

Conforming and Relinking Media
DaVinci Resolve provides a wealth of tools to help you deal with managing the relationship
between clips in the Media Pool and clips in timelines, and with the links between each clip and
its corresponding media file on disk. You can use these tools to manage different project
workflows, or to deal with problems that can occur when importing project files in any format
from a variety of sources.
This section describes every method available in DaVinci Resolve for conforming clips and
relinking media. More information on the clip metadata that’s used to determine the
correspondences between clips and media is found later in this chapter.
Conforming and Relinking During Project Import
When you import an AAF or XML file, you have the ability to relink the clips that are imported
into the Media Pool to the corresponding source media files on disk as part of the process. As
an automatic result, the imported timeline is conformed to the clips in the Media Pool, and you
end up with a Media Pool full of clips, and an arrangement of those clips in the imported
timeline. Because it all usually happens at the same time, it’s easy to confuse the distinction
between a timeline’s relationship to the clips in the Media Pool, and each clip’s relationship to
their corresponding source media file on disk.
The workflow for importing an EDL makes this process more explicit, since you must first import
all of the clips you need into the Media Pool, making sure that they have the correct reel names
and timecode. This creates the link between the Media Pool clips and the source media on disk.
You then import the EDL in a second step, which creates a timeline that attempts to reconform
itself to the clips in the Media Pool using reel name and timecode information.
Conforming and Relinking Existing Timelines and Clips
There are many reasons why you might want to reconform or relink media long after you’ve
started editing or grading a project, so DaVinci Resolve provides additional tools to facilitate
these workflows as well. For example, you may have started a project using placeholder VFX or
stock footage clips, but you later need to replace these with final versions of the same shots.
Or, you may have decided to edit a project using transcoded versions of the camera raw media
files you were given, only to decide later that you want to switch one or all of the clips in the
timeline to use the original camera media instead for grading and finishing. DaVinci Resolve has
a wide variety of tools to support these workflows and more.
The Difference Between Conforming and Relinking
While these two terms are often used synonymously, conforming typically refers to the
process of matching clips in a timeline to the appropriate source clips in the Media
Pool, while relinking typically refers to the process of matching a source clip in the
Media Pool to its corresponding media file on disk. This is a recent change
necessitated by an expansion of relinking and reconforming options, so the author
offers his apologies if this usage is not always consistent.
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