🎬 Project Export & “Media Management”

This term can be confusing, but as it relates to NLE software, we’re talking about taking the media used in the current project and moving it somewhere. This can be done efficiently by the use of “trims” where only the portion of the media file used is copied.

Your codec becomes important here and it’s something to consider up front. RedCineX and Resolve can create R3D “trims”, but other raw formats are less supported.

Something to watch out for: Resolve specifically will now trim long-GOP footage, but timecode will likely be lost. You’ll need to media manage to a new project to avoid problems re-conforming to the new media.

Project Export

You have the option to “Export” or “Archive” from the project manager window. “Export” just makes a .drp project file in the order of a few megabytes. If you open it on another machine and can link up to your original media you should be good to go! Resolve doesn’t ever make a project file like Premiere because it’s database driven so you have to export/import projects. LUTs and Stills can be saved with the export so the new system you’re transferring to can access them.

You can also “Archive” a project (.dra file) which allows for inclusion of optimized media and pulls all the used media into a new location along with a project file. It makes it super easy to transfer a project along with all associated footage to another user or to archive.The issue with archiving is that the process fails if you have any offline media from what I can tell. 

BOTH OF THESE DIFFER FROM FILE>MEDIA MANAGEMENT which lets you isolate only the used media and copy/transcode/move it. Because you can ‘relink to new files’ in the media manager, it seems most logical to use media manager to clean up the project, then archive it inside project manager. 

At the top I mentioned some raw codecs not having great media manage support. In that case, one could media manage with transcode all raw clips to ProRes and relink to them in a new project. (Remember right click relink a folder in the media pool to find all the various media in subdirectories.) Just be aware that future improvements in raw format decoding aren’t available if you don’t archive the camera raw originals.