A question about upgrading from Resolve 14 to 15

[Michael Gissing]

[john whiteway] “And why do so many things I’ve read (primarily a long piece by Patrick Inhoffer) emphasize the impotance of exporting and backing up both database and project files? Is this simply as a safely measure in case something screws up when upgrading to 15?”

Yes. In all my updates since Resolve 9 I have just allowed the new version to convert the database. The backup of both database and individual projects gives you the option of importing projects into a new database if the conversion of the old database somehow fails. I backup database and project files on a fairly regular basis anyway to an external drive just in case. Also in the future if I need to revisit a project I can import just that project. So this is just an extension of good practice whenever a new version, especially a beta, is installed.

[Robert Withers]

I don’t know who wrote this guide but I understood it and followed it and upgraded with no problems:
https://mixinglight.com/color-tutorial/guide-upgrade-davinci-resolve-15/
Best wishes,
Robert

Robert Withers

Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City

[Marc Wielage]

[Robert Withers] “I don’t know who wrote this guide but I understood it and followed it and upgraded with no problems:
https://mixinglight.com/color-tutorial/guide-upgrade-davinci-resolve-15/“
That was written by Patrick Inhofer of MixingLight.com, with a little bit from me.

[John Whiteway]

Hi,

Since I posted my original questions I’ve been reading a bit more and re-reading Inhofer’s article “Guide To Safely Upgrading To DaVinci Resolve 15 (and beyond)” (which I quoted in my original post and which has been mentioned in this thread) https://mixinglight.com/color-tutorial/guide-upgrade-davinci-resolve-15/. I think I understand a lot more of what he’s saying now, but still a few questions remain.

My initial confusion came, I realize now, by misreading these two paragraphs:

A. Decide what you’re going to do with existing projects and databases
Are you going to upgrade active or recent projects? If so, then before upgrading you need to export those projects. And then NEVER upgrade the original project! You will only ever import that exported version of the project, always leaving the original intact and untouched.

Are you going to upgrade an existing Database, with existing projects? If so, then export that database and NEVER upgrade the original database. The key is to always leaving the original intact and untouched.

These paragraphs are discussing backing up both project files and databases, so when he emphasized in italics that one must always leave the original intact and untouched, I assumed he was still talking about these back-ups, which are also “original” files. I was taking him to say we must be careful to always leave these exported and backed-up original copies intact and untouched. I just couldn’t figure why he was emphasizing this, or what circumstances would ever exist where we’d be tempted to alter them. Now I realize, when talking about the “original” database of project files, he is talking of the files that remain on the boot system. Now things began to make a bit of sense.

I understand, too, what added importance he’s placing on backed-up files. Not only do we back them us as a safety measure, to insure ourselves in case something bad happens when installing 15; they also play a central role in the new 15. Inhofer advises that when we open 15 and the Project Manager page for the first time, we should not follow the prompt that will appear (“Would you like to upgrade the database”) . Instead, he advises we open a fresh database and import the backed-up 14 database to it and then upgrade this file (thus “leaving the original intact and untouched “).

Now I can follow all this but I am left with this question: If we do as Inhofer suggests and leave the original 14 database in 15 unaltered – now sitting alongside the new database with the imported and upgraded copy of the 14 database – when will we ever have a chance to use it? When installing 15 isn’t 14 uninstalled? Doesn’t Inhoffer suggest we should uninstall 14 manually first before installing 15? So after taking so much care to keep two versions of the 14 database – one as a back-up on a back-up drive, and one, the original, now sitting there un-upgraded on the newly installed 15, after taking all this care where does the circumstance ever exist that Inhofer describes:

Once again: You only update imported databases! Don’t update an existing database already connected to Resolve, in case you need to downgrade and want to use it in the earlier version (emphasis mine). Database updates are irreversible.

Guess I’m asking: all this considered, where is he suggesting we would retain and have access to 14 (and the 14 database) after installing 15? At one point he even cautions against running two versions of resolve side-by-side, so it seems he must envision them both remaining on our computer:

Tip 2: Do NOT run two versions of Resolve side-by-side
Even if Rohit or Peter (the Lead Software Developer and Product Manager) tell you it’s okay to run Resolve 14 alongside Resolve 15 (which they don’t)… ignore their advice. Don’t do it!

Again, if the installer messes up or if the software gets confused because the two versions are side-by-side – you’re going to need to uninstall both and do a completely fresh install simply to troubleshoot it!

Hope someone can clarify this for me. I suspect, as is most often the case, there is some simple point that’s been eluding me and that once hearing it I’ll go “A ha!”

Thanks.

John

[Robert Withers]

Hi John,
They say you can download and reinstall Resolve 14 should you need it, at least for now. So I bought into all of Inhofer’s suggestions and it has just worked.
I’m a bit of a backup nut — I’m keeping a Macbook Pro running OS Mountain Lion so I can keep running old software and accessing old files in FCP7 and “old” Premiere etc.
Sometimes movies have lifetimes of decades — hard to manage this in the digital age but was always tricky to manage storage even with celluloid.
I’m looking at using Resolve going forward — hope it doesn’t keep “updating” every half-year like Adobe.
Getting mentally prepared for Apple’s next update that will deprecate most current movie codecs in a post-Mojave 64-bit OS version.
Cheers,
Robert

Robert Withers

Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City

[Marc Wielage]

If you must run Resolve 14, do it on a different boot partition. You have to do that because it will attempt to access the Project Database, and that’ll be a trainwreck since it’s already been converted to the Resolve 15 format.

The instructions in Patrick’s article are very specific and I think work very well. The key to me is, if you absolutely had to, you could rent or borrow a cheap 2nd machine, install Resolve 14 on it (with a compatible operating system), import your exported Resolve 14 Project Database, and you could resurrect anything you needed there. And the second key is, it’s very safe to export an actual project file (DRP) and then import that into a new version of Resolve later on. That works about 99.9% of the time.

Absolute worst-case scenario (like a corrupted DRP), you could still import XMLs to rebuild the timeline and import all timeline stills to rebuild all the color corrections. But I’ve only had that happen twice in 9 years, which is a pretty good average. That’s like a brute force technique to reconstruct a session, and I have not seen that happen in some time.

[John Whiteway]

Thank you both for the replies.

Robert, I am, too, heavy on the back-ups and have kept a computer with an older OS so that I still have access to FCP7. But as time goes on I see little likelihood I’ll go back to FCP other than, perhaps, to look at some old projects (I’ve had little luck importing a FCP XML file to Resolve). I’m a true Resolve convert now; it does so much more that FCP.

Marc, what you say makes full sense to me and my understanding of how Resolve works. Inhofer does talk about the partition option early in his piece, so I’m guessing reference he makes later in the piece to downgrading (“Don’t update an existing database already connected to Resolve, in case you need to downgrade and want to use it in the earlier version.”) is meant for those who take this route. Thank you for your thoughts. As I think I’ve mentioned, I’ve watched Inhofer’s colour correction tutorials on Lynda.com. He’s a lucid and thorough educator, and I’ve certainly learned a lot from him.

Thanks again.

John