DaVinci Resolve: Consolidate Clips Function

DaVinci Resolve: Consolidate Clips Function

November 1, 2014

DaVinci Resolve's renamed Consolidate Clips function can now work with Quicktime and MXF files. Learn how to use this command.


How do you use DaVinci Resolve Trim Clips Consolidate Clips Function?

Imagine: A client walks in your grading suite with 6 terabytes of footage on a Raid, drops it on your desk and says, “Please color grade this film and I have no idea which of these 6 terabytes are in my locked picture.”

Question: How the heck are you supposed to copy 6 terabytes to your local, high-performance hard drives at the drop of a hat?

In some circles, they hand that RAID over to an assistant who painstakingly goes shot by shot through the film, copying each camera original file that’s used in the final timeline.

For a 60 minute timeline we could end up with a few dozen hours of camera original footage.

Talk about a waste of time spent copying excessive media. And a waste of hard drive space storing all that excessive media.

How about this alternative: You copy to your drives only the precise media you need?

By precise I mean: You trim down those hours and hours of unused footage to only those moments that appear in the finished timeline. And you do it without recompressing your footage (and taking a hit in image quality). This trim down would be bit-for-bit identical to the camera originals—just shorter.

Instead of copying 6TB of footage, we’re talking copying only 100-300GB of footage (depending on the codec).

At that amount of footage, it’s easy to get that material off your client’s drives… and at the end of the job, it’s easy to archive that source footage.

DaVinci Resolve has exactly this ‘trim’ function. It’s called Trim Clips Consolidate Clips.

Is now called 'Consolidate Clips' in Resolve 11.1.1 and later
‘Trim Clips’ is now called ‘Consolidate Clips’ in Resolve 11.1.1

That’s what this Insight is about. How to use Resolve 11’s ‘Consolidate Clips’ command. This video is ripped from MixingLight’s DaVinci Resolve 11 Deep Insights training. We recorded it after Blackmagic released the Resolve 11.1 update, since that update broadened the usefulness of the ‘Consolidate Clips’ command. Prior to Resolve 11.1 this command could only be used with RED footage and image sequences.

With Resolve 11.1 and later, Consolidate Clips can now be used on quicktime movies and .mxf files—making it supremely useful to a much broader range of DaVinci Resolve users.

In DaVinci Resolve 11.1.1 Upate, ‘Trim Clips’ was renamed ‘Consolidate Clips’.

When I recorded this video Insight, I was using DaVinci Resolve 11.1, so I’ll be demoing the functionality of this function using the ‘Trim Clips’ command.

If you’re running Resolve 11.1.1 or later – then just mentally substitute ‘Consolidate Clips’ where you see me use ‘Trim Clips’ command and we’ll be talking about the exact same thing.

Enjoy!

As always, use the comments to ask questions or add your own thoughts to this Insight!

– Patrick

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Comments

Homepage Forums DaVinci Resolve: Consolidate Clips Function

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  • No matter how they rename it in R11.1.1, I’m so glad the to be able to consolidate MOV clips since R11.1.

    That said, I have several archived projects that would greatly benefit from such treatment, allowing me to save several GB on my drives. The only problem is they have already been graded. Any idea on how to trim the clips and then reapply the grades? Once the conform will be done, I don’t want to have to copy/paste snapshots on all clips. Do you think Color Trace is the way to go? Thank you.

  • Has anyone had any issues errors when trying to consolidate QT .MOV files using H.264 codec (Canon DSLR Camera originals)? It doesnt appear to work properly when I try it, but wanted to see if anyone else had success or issues.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Are you getting errors or it’s just skipping them? I’m pretty sure if the extension isn’t .mov then Resolve will skip it.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Well… while opening an old project in a new version of Resolve usually works, you can’t precisely guarantee that it’ll work precisely.

    If you do use the Consolidate Clips function after grading, then yes – Color Trace is how I’d copy the grades across.

  • no errors, its just copying only a several files out of a few hundred and its copying the entire file, not the in/out plus handles of the edit. No consolidation seems to be occurring (??). It DOES go through the entire “Consolidating x to 453 shots” progress, but it doesnt output what I expect from a trim. For this project, I just moved on and continued w full files, but it was something I wanted to check with others bring up w BMD if it was a bug. Appreciate the help!


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    The bug would be it telling you it was trimming 453 shots but only actually trimming a small number of them. But make sure those other checkboxes are turned off as I show in the video…. otherwise you *will* get unexpected results.


  • Ian Grey
    Member

    What would you do if client turns up for 4/5 drives….do a rinse and repeat process?

    Also i’m not quite sure what this is doing? Is it encoding new files or do R3D files remain R3D and would you be able to consolidate ProRes files on a PC?


  • RobbieCarman
    Guest

    yes, files stay in their original container – so R3D is R3D etc. That’s a great question about ProRes consolidate on PC I will give that a try at the office in the morning


  • RobbieCarman
    Guest

    I get the feeling (haven’t tried myself) that Resolve like many other apps won’t trim long-GOP footage. So you’d probably get the same results with H264, XDCAM etc


  • Razvan
    Guest

    If you have more shots from the same master clip, it will only consolidate the first shot. Seems like the only option is to turn on “consolidate multi-edit extents”, which can copy a lot of unwanted media. Has anyone found a way to consolidate separately only the used parts of a bigger master clip?


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    If you turn on ‘consolidate multi-edit extents’ it’ll copy from the first frame of the first shot used in that clip to the last frame of the last shot used in that clip… and everything in between. If you want each segment of the clip to be copied without the stuff in between, you’ll need to turn off that option.

  • Ah, ok…Thanks Robbie. Both checkboxes are not checked, but it def is not working correctly. Seems its either a bug or its not intended to work with long-GOP footage yet. I’ll assume the later. Thank you both!

  • Confirmed, worked fine on all but long-gop (h264 and other heavily compressed media) material.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Then it works as designed. But I’d like an accurate number count… so I have an idea of how clips its skipping.


  • leva.tolstoy.1976
    Guest

    Cant trim r3d clips in 12 version. Any suggestion?

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