Embarrassingly basic question about importing

[John Michaels]

If you would prefer to maintain the folder structure as it exists on your SD card, you can right-click the top-level folder in Resolve and choose “Add Folder and Subfolders to Media Pool” to go in and find all the footage for you.

Note that at this point, you should have already copied the contents of your SD to a hard drive of some sort so that you’re working off a drive. Davinci won’t physically copy any files, and you certainly don’t want to be working off your SD card.

[Terence Morris]

John – thanks for clarifying that. My related question then is, after copying the files over, do I then need to manually convert them to an editable format like Pro Res before adding them to the Media Pool? Or is this something that Resolve can do on the hop, like FCPX?

[Joseph Owens]

[Terence Morris] “do I then need to manually convert them to an editable format like Pro Res before adding them to the Media Pool? Or is this something that Resolve can do on the hop, like FCPX?”

It becomes a matter of processing power and convenience. If Resolve recognizes your media, you are good to go, although there may be some caveats with respect to how much energy the application will have to expend on building the intra frames if it is a Long-GOP format. Occasionally there have been issues with secondary processes involving tracking and variable speed frame remapping.

ProRes is optimized as an intra (all frames are real) format, so the bitstream doesn’t have to be digested multiple times by the machine before you get a solid playback, so it doesn’t have to bother re-mapping the b/p fields so that all other optical processes are much easier and faster at the CPU level.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Robert Ober]

[John Michaels] “Note that at this point, you should have already copied the contents of your SD to a hard drive of some sort so that you’re working off a drive. Davinci won’t physically copy any files, and you certainly don’t want to be working off your SD card.”

Actually, starting with Resolve 11 one can use the Clone function to backup the card’s data to multiple drives/locations. Works well.

The Resolve manual is full of info.

Y’all have some fun,
Robert

Robert A. Ober
IT Consultant, Vidcaster, & Freelancer
http://www.infohou.com
Houston, TX

[Terence Morris]

Joseph; Thanks for joining those dots. I’ll probably go with Pro Res as the editing format for speed on my current rig. Funny that you mention Long-GOP. I’m about to invest in a PXW-X70 having XAVC-L, so I will definitely want to digest that into an easier editing format.

[Terence Morris]

Thanks for that, Robert.