Speaker 1: Welcome back to Jon's Films. On a recent video, Lane Watson asked me, Hey Jon, off topic, but could you show me how you deal with media as you ingest it across your workstation? What do you do with the Media tab and how does it work? Thanks, Lane. Okay, obviously I was paraphrasing, but it's a great idea for DaVinci Resolve for Beginners, Episode 4, Media Management. On my workstation, I have 3 NVMe drives and 2 spinning platter drives. I shoot on either the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K or a GH5. Both of those yield portable media drives, which I need to ingest into my computer over here on the right, and use as I work through my editing workflow. My computer is set up as such. It's got a C drive, which has both Windows and DaVinci Resolve installed on it. Then it has a P drive, that stands for project files, and an X drive, which is for my scratch files. Finally, I have long-term storage and backup here on the right. When I start a new project and I've shot a bunch of footage, the first thing I do is open up the drive, so this would be the USB drive off the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K. I've got that plugged into the USB 3.1 Type-C port on the back of my computer, and I'm able to move the files very quickly. I do this what you might consider the hard way, which is to manually drag and drop each of these files into my project file folder. I have a video footage folder, and here are the active projects that I'm working on. I have to be careful now that I have the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K, that's a mouthful, because its files are much bigger and so they're starting to fill up my project drive more quickly. But I work off of this drive, and this P drive, the project drive, is where all my active media sits. However, I use the X drive, scratch drive, for scratch. And I do that by, in DaVinci Resolve, setting my project settings. I would come in and make sure that this, instead of set to the P folder, is set to the X folder, and I'll have a cache clip here on the X folder. That makes it much quicker for it to cache all of the optimized media I may generate, or even this blue line cache that runs up above. So I've got my cache clip, which runs here, and I've got my output, meaning when I render my files out, I can come over to my delivery tab, and when I set up a render job here, I always choose location to be the X drive. There we go. So now effectively what I'm doing is taking the media directly from the camera, putting it on the project drive, where I'll work from it. The DaVinci Resolve and Windows applications are running here on the C drive, so there's no conflict in I-O there. And DaVinci Resolve is using the X drive, or scratch drive, for both the cache and the output. When I'm finished working on a particular project, theoretically I'd be good about it and come to the project drive and copy that down into my bulk storage drive. I have a published videos section. There we go. And so I move that over. I accidentally put it in frame rates, but it's okay. And I'm moving this over from the project drive into what I call my bulk storage drive here. Now I have a replication job that runs between the bulk storage drive and the backup drive, which is the second one, so that I've got two copies of my footage in case there's a drive failure. One thing to note, if there were a virus that hit my workstation, it could wipe out both of my copies. Keep that in mind when you're planning your backups. I have a backup job that runs as well from the backup drive to my NAS storage here in the studio. So abstractly, that's my workflow. Camera to project, project to scratch for use. I output to either YouTube or on my corporate side over to our render media farm. And then I push into my backup drives, which then automatically handle the backup. Let's see what you could do in DaVinci Resolve to accomplish much of the same tasks. Here on the media page, you can mount any and all of your footage. Now this is, like I said, all the footage that I've got and shot on that Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K. Alright, we're going to call that the BIMC 4K from now on, because good grief. I could edit directly off of this drive if I wanted to. However, not going to do that. I'm going to use the clone tool. Opening Resolve, we'll jump to the media page at the bottom. You can see I've now got, on the left, all of the drives across my physical workstation. I have my USB drive that I've got attached to the computer. And from here, I'm able to browse through all of these files. Don't confuse this, however, for a file explorer where I'd be able to copy media from one drive to the next. This is strictly for reading the media off of these drives. Now, Resolve's vision would be that you would clone the media by clicking the clone tool. And choosing the drive that you would pull it from, drag and drop the folder there for folder clone. And then, where would I like to put the footage? I'll put it on my project drive. Much like I would if I were doing this manually. And I've created a BIMC 4K folder that I drag and drop there so that we can see it there. Now, what does this do? If I click clone, it's now taking everything that's in the folder clone and it is copying it to the BIMC folder on my project drive. It's about 56 gigs of data. I selected just a few files. It will take a minute. While that's happening, we can talk a little bit about why I don't use this. As you notice, I had to choose a folder clone folder. Well, when the BIMC 4K shoots footage on this drive, it just puts it in the root directory. I keep a lot on here. There's some work stuff here. There's regular footage that I've shot. There's stuff that's throwaway and I don't need to copy to my workstation for editing. But it would take everything. So I either have to come in and do some curation of this content here. Which, if I'm going to be here anyway, I'm just going to copy it down into this folder and call it done. So this is why I don't use the clone tool here in Resolve. But this would be what you would do to move the footage if you were to do your entire workflow inside Resolve. From here, I've got it available to me to edit with. And I can move this down into my project pool where we're used to. And I'm now able to go into either my cut or edit page and work with this footage just like I would have previously. So now we've seen how Resolve intends to handle ingest of media here with the clone tool. So what does Blackmagic expect us to do with Resolve when we're done working? You saw I manually copy the data from the project folder over to my bulk storage folder. Which has a replication job to the backup folder. Well, what do they expect? They expect us to go into file and media management. Here, and there's a great benefit to using this, I should use it more frequently. Here, I have the ability to copy or move an entire project down to a separate drive. In this case, I could choose my media destination drive to be my bulk storage drive. Go to published videos. There we go. And here, I would be able to move all of the media that has been touched by this project. So anything I've ingested and pulled into my media pool would be copied down to this drive. Or, and this is the big win if you're really archiving stuff, move only the used media files. So I could significantly cut down the amount of throwaway garbage footage that I would have on my backup drives by checking this solution. Here, we would move only the files that I've cut up and used. I could even do move and trim using the media I've kept. And this would be things that are actually in the footage. So in my final timeline, only handle the frames that are there. And give me, I don't know, in case I really need to edit it for transitions or whatnot, say give me 24 frames. So one second on either side. One second on either side of my cuts that are in there. You have some other options here. You could take all of the individual segments and just make them one big media file. You'd likely have to break them apart later though, so I wouldn't bother doing that. You could preserve the folder hierarchy, which I would do. And you could then delete unused media. So that is media files that are in your media pool that you did not use in your timeline that you're now not moving over into the bulk storage drive here, my D drive. And therefore you no longer need them. You can tell it to delete. You get a fancy warning that says, warning, you're deleting files. But what you can see is it took a 100 gig project, and now because I don't have much on my timeline, 216 megabytes is all that it will take up on my bulk storage drive. The rest of this would get trashed. You're able to address this on three levels, the entire project, the timelines, or a set of clips. And further, if you'd like to transcode, in other words manually create optimized media, or you have a different use for it that you need to throw it somewhere else, this is a quick way for you to transcode video that is bulk in a folder and move it in a different format to another folder. Thank you for watching DaVinci Resolve for Beginners, Episode 4, Media Management. If you have any questions or other ideas for new videos, please reach out to me in the comments below. And, as always, like the video to help others find it. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. DaVinci Resolve