Opening older projects

Hi, i need to open an old davinci project created in jan 2018. The project is in a diskbased database. I tried to connect to the db with davinci 14 and 15 but it didnt work. Is there a way to open a project that wasnt exported or backuped? Or maybe there is another way to connect to old database?

Many thanks in advance!

Have you tried using 16?

Of course, first of all I tried 16.

Copy the specific project folder from the older database, and paste it into the Projects folder of new 16 database. Then load Resolve and see if the project comes up. (This *may* work.)

OK.

When you tried with 16, what exactly did you do, and what was the specific result? "Didn't work" is rather vague.

Yes, you can convert old databases. Backup the old database, then import it to the new Resolve Project Manager, and it should convert just fine.

When we finish a project, our standard procedure is to save a DRP labeled PROJECT_NAME_FINAL_DATE.DRP and leave that in the "Color" folder in the project directory. This later gets archived and backed up to another drive. If, years later, we need to recall this project, we just import the DRP and (one hopes) everything will come up exactly as it was in the previous version.

We have seen some issues where some stuff fell through the cracks. I had a case about 18 months ago where a feature shot on BMD 4.6K CinemaDNG in Resolve 14 came up looking horrendous sometime later in Resolve 15.3. I eventually determined that for some reason, the Raw settings were ignored, and once I fixed those, it was perfect. In this specific case, I don't think more than 30 minutes of the feature were affected, so this was not a total disaster, but it did give me a momentary heart attack. It took maybe an hour to fix, not that big a deal.

I sympathize with Blackmagic, because if you examine the database structure of the color and sizing decisions inside Resolve from (say) version 7.0 to version 16, there have been massive, massive changes. Having to interpret and convert all these pixels is an extraordinary challenge. From my perspective, it's amazing it works as well as it does. This problem is not just confined to Resolve. Look at it this way: if you take a Premiere edit session from 2005, I bet it'll be problematic to bring in to Premiere in 2020. I once had a case where we needed to get an edit list from a 1995 editing program to a 2000 editing program, and it failed miserably. We wound up jumping through hoops and almost had to resort to manually rebuilding it one shot at a time, but a series of steps finally resurrected 99% of the session. Old graphics programs, sound editing software, and image-editing software also has the same challenge.

Old graphics programs, sound editing software, and image-editing software also has the same challenge.

Yes, I needed to access a multitrack audio project from 20 years ago recently. The company that wrote the software no longer exists and it wouldn't run on Win10 or Win7. I ended up installing a Win98 VM, loading the software on that and then exported stems.