Export Audio Only

Hi there,

is there any way to export only audio from a DaVinci Timeline without any video renderings?

hopefully with the next update.

Johannes

This is SUCH a huge pain. Combined with the fact that you simply cannot lay black (or any generated colors) on the top video track and render and HAVE to have a real video track enabled...

I know BM wants us to see Resolve as a "real editor" but it's a long, long way off yet.

Yesterday I would have wondered "Why on earth would anybody want to do that?"

This morning, I realized I needed to do a lot of audio ducking, and when such tools were not to be found in Resolve, realized the need to export audio so I can fix it and bring it back in. Silly that I have to render video just to get audio...

Having fought this battle a few weeks ago, I did find a solution to extract audio via ffmpeg.

If anyone is interested in going down that path I'd be happy to share my batch file contents.

Doesn't it look silly when after editing with such high end soft as Resolve you have to turn to something like ffmpeg

Doesn't it look silly when after editing with such high end soft as Resolve you have to turn to something like ffmpeg

I develop software for a living. Trust me, I'm quite used to looking silly.

Doesn't it look silly when after editing with such high end soft as Resolve you have to turn to something like ffmpeg

I develop software for a living. Trust me, I'm quite used to looking silly.

It's not just silly, it's a shame. I'm very disappointed in general about the current audio limitations in DR12 as NLE.

It's not just silly, it's a shame. I'm very disappointed in general about the current audio limitations in DR12 as NLE.

I would agree that there's still much to be done.

Maybe it's just because I live on the other side of the software development fence, but what I see is an app that's been a dedicated colorist tool since birth, and about five minutes ago they bolted on an NLE. They got the basics of that going, and now it's time to build it out. Meanwhile, there are enhancement requests and bug fixes needed across the entire system. All of this is important.

What happens next is triage - what are the most important things that will a) get new customers and b) keep from losing existing ones. You'd think the order would be reversed, but it never is. So, the marketing department usually drives the train. Developers often fight tooth and nail for different priorities, but believe it or not, programmers are very close to the bottom of the food chain when it comes to decision making.

So, even though Resolve has been around a long time, as an NLE I'd call it a 1.0 product. It'll get better, but that's going to take time. And I promise you, no matter what choices are made in triage, there will be a significant group of users who will be unhappy. The programming biz is very complex (both technically and politically). It's a helluva lot harder to get this stuff out the door than people think.

I found a way to escape the ethically challenged ecosystem of Adobe, and I didn't even have to pay for the software. There are plenty of things that need improvement, but it'll get there. In the meantime, when I encounter problems, I'll look for workarounds. I've found the community here to be very generous with their help. If the pain of the workarounds ever exceeds the benefits of the software, I'll move on. Until then, I'll enjoy what it does for me and find solutions when it falls short.

There is no such thing as software without flaws, and development a continual exercise in tradeoffs. It is what it is.

Thank you for that very realistic comment, Chris!

Thank you for that very realistic comment, Chris!

Hey, I get frustrated as much as the next guy, so believe me, I know how irritating it can be. Plus, I'm a major control freak, so it makes me crazy when there's a problem and I have zero control over it.

On the other hand, I make a living in an industry that's more in need of adult supervision than any on the planet. The books I've written have been more about strategy, organization and navigating the human factor than the tech side of things. For all its complexities, coding is actually the easiest part of the tech business.

It's not so much the lack of features that bothers me. It's the lack of features combined with the GROSSLY overstated capabilities spouted by marketing.

To wit:

I have just started a grading project for a micro-budget indie film. I laid the project out by creating bins (folders) for each shoot day. So we have 19 days of shooting giving 19 subfolders under master. I go through each day, flag the takes the editor wants to use, enter the metadata (scene, shot, angle) and prepare to go to work.

Then, I find out that I can't filter on just the flagged takes. What? Then I find I can't filter or even see just circled takes. I go to the Master bin and try to do a search for all files with a certain set of characters in the name. No go. Search only works in the ONE folder you're sitting in.

This is not complex programming, and it is absolutely fundamental to even the most basic of editing. Getting yourself organized and ready to edit is job one. Avid figured this stuff out over a decade ago. Just copy what they're doing. You could do far worse.

You can't export audio. You can't export titles. You can't do ANYTHING in the background even though we are running on hardware capable of doing online 4K edits. Once I start a render in the deliver page, I have to walk away from the machine because it's effectively locked up for any other tasks. We are still using DONGLES in 2016.

It's maddening that a company that can be so progressive in some ways, is rooted in ancient history in other ways.

Sounds pretty frustrating, man. Hope you're able to find some workaraounds.

Sounds pretty frustrating, man. Hope you're able to find some workaraounds.

Grin and bear it is the work around. Until this thing becomes a lot more competent as an editor, it's MUCH faster to roundtrip to an NLE and grade in resolve.

FYI, Smart Bins will do the search recursively, it's a reasonably efficient way of corralling footage via metadata, and would definitely do what you are looking for unless I'm misunderstanding...

Lack of audio export is a buzzkill for sure. Gotta say, not many people use Resolve as a creative editing tool just yet, so developers are likely getting less feedback in that area.

I know Resolve wants to be an NLE, but it's lagging behind for many reasons. It was developed as a color correction system by a company that did nothing but color correction systems (DaVinci). When I first started using Resolve, version 4 - before BMD bought it, back when a basic license & installation cost @ $250,000, there was pretty much nothing you could do in edit other than cuts and dissolves. It was easier to modify an EDL in a text editor and re-import than it was to try and adjust clips inside of Resolve.

For a few years now Resolve has featured more and more NLE functions, but its priority has been finishing - online style editing, color correction, final delivery, and that's completely fine by me. There are plenty of features that I feel need improving / implementing on that side of things before creative editing.

Metadata manipulation & filtering is a different story, and I think that's a place Resolve could really learn a thing or two from Avid, and I think DITs and dailies folks would really appreciate Avid & Colorfront levels of metadata manipulation / ease.

It seems to me that there are two very different audiences for Resolve now. Pro colorists who have been using it for ages, and the fairly new crop of people like me who have come to Resolve because it offered NLE features. That brings with it two very different sets of expectations.

I wonder if it would make sense for the moderators to split the Resolve forum into two - Resolve Coloring, and Resolve Editing. Since my questions are usually about the latter, I almost feel like I'm getting in the way of the colorists who come here to discuss the aspects of their primary tool.

It's not so much the lack of features that bothers me. It's the lack of features combined with the GROSSLY overstated capabilities spouted by marketing.

I couldn't say this better when in comes to DR as a NLE and sound capability.

I wonder if it would make sense for the moderators to split the Resolve forum into two - Resolve Coloring, and Resolve Editing. Since my questions are usually about the latter, I almost feel like I'm getting in the way of the colorists who come here to discuss the aspects of their primary tool.

that's a nice proposal, but i'm not sure, if it would hit the nail.
although it would cover the two most obvious camps in this forum, it wouldn't change much as long as more technical questions and decisions still do not find a place and open answers from the responsible side (developers, blackmagic marketing). that's the key point for me, because i often feel exactly like you:

Hey, I get frustrated as much as the next guy, so believe me, I know how irritating it can be. Plus, I'm a major control freak, so it makes me crazy when there's a problem and I have zero control over it.

separating different groups of users and their specific interests doesn't look so important to me. with a little bit of respect it shouldn't be impossible to coexist in a single small and vibrant place. but this lack of participation in a real dialog from the responsible side is indeed very frustrating.

sure -- you will sometimes see responses and help from the developers here on the forum -- especially if the issues are quite trivial and apple mac related, but it never ever touches any serious request or question. in all that cases you will not see any reaction at all. i can not even remember of one remarkable exception that would falsify this rule.

i don't know how you think about this issue?
do you have any idea, how it could be mitigated?

it doesn't make much sense, if we always have to reproduce the same stupid role play among each other, but nobody from the responsible side joins the conversation or takes it serious...

I wonder if it would make sense for the moderators to split the Resolve forum into two - Resolve Coloring, and Resolve Editing.

Not really, because colorists are often required to manipulate the timeline, particularly when projects are imported from other NLEs. They may not be making substantive editing changes, but they're still doing a lot of "editing".

And to be fair, some of the complaints about the NLE reflect expectations that R12 will behave like other NLEs. The frustration over searching metadata expressed above *is* dealt with, to some extent, by creating smart bins, though search functionality independent of bins would be nice.

i don't know how you think about this issue?

Most software companies keep developers as far away from users as humanly possible. It's simply not the programmer's job to be the help desk. They have their hands full as it is.

Your sentiments are not only valid, but almost universal. You'll have a hard time visiting a software forum for any product with a sizable user base without seeing your exact words.

Companies avoid excessive communication with the user base for a reason. Even when they can keep marketing in check, they constantly get dinged for over promising and not delivering. There's a legitimate reason for this, but it's hard to understand if you're not in the business.

I do this stuff for a living. I've been slinging code since 1989, so I'm a pretty senior level developer. I also spent most of my career working as a contractor, so I've seen a lot more shops in those years than the average developer. So here's the crux of the problem.

Management says, "how long will it take you to do xyz." The honest answer 90% of the time is "we don't know." Programming is not only complicated, we depend on APIs and tools from many other companies. The documentation sucks more often than not (if there is any to begin with). The tools have their own bugs. You can make great progress on a one week project for three days, and then lose two weeks chasing something like this. And you never know when it's going to bite you. Ask any programmer on the planet what the hardest thing to do is and they'll all tell you - give a 100% accurate estimate of time. It's damn near impossible. And I've been at this for years, writing everything from air traffic control systems to concert lighting to financial software to database apps.

Of course, "I don't know" doesn't fly too well with management types. So they just pick a date and say, "we're going to release these 20 new features on this date." The programmers are then expected to work 7 days a week and pull nonstop all-nighters to meet this arbitrary deadline that was arrived at without the slightest reference to reality. I don't know about you, but I don't do my best work at 4 AM after weeks of no sleep and too much caffeine. And then they wonder why releases are often bug ridden disasters. But programmers aren't the decision makers in software shops. We just have to live with it.

So, it's all management's fault, right? In a world without money, that would be true. But a business has to keep selling, so there's a constant demand for features that will make that happen. And that's almost always more important than bug fixes - they've already spent your money. No new customers, no payroll. So bug fixes get pushed to the back burner, and the new features aimed at bringing in new blood often don't meet the needs of those who are already here. That sounds very unfair.

And yet, if companies don't do this, they go out of business. Your competitors are selling vaporware to make customers wait for their product instead of buying yours now. So you push a little vaporware of your own. If the companies who originally owned Resolve and Fusion were making tons of money, do you really think they would have sold to BMD? This business is hard. Much, much harder than customers realize. And yet they're the ones caught in the middle. Life is unfair.

You're not happy that there are the abc bugs and the lack of the xyz features. I can dig it. But - and I say this with all possible sympathy and respect - you have absolutely no idea what takes place on the other side of the fence. This is the way the software business works in almost every shop out there. Ditch this product, go to a new company, and find the same problems there. Ditch that and move to yet another one, same story. Frankly, the way the industry runs, I'm surprised and delighted the freakin' computer boots in the first place. I once naively wrote books hoping to change the industry. It was a fool's errand.

All of which is to say, this is reality. You can spend your time being unhappy about it or find workarounds and build the best environment you can with what your tools can currently do. But you're not going to find a single product out there that's immune to your concerns. Visit the forums for Adobe, Avid, et al. You'll see this discussion in every one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is the way I think things should be. I'm just saying it's the way things are. And I'd rather spend my days being happy than angry.

And to be fair, some of the complaints about the NLE reflect expectations that R12 will behave like other NLEs.

Yeah, that makes sense. This NLE is really a 1.0 bolt on to a very mature and full featured color system. While it's not perfect (no software ever is), the colorist features have been heavy hitters in the industry for a long time. You can't put out a new release with, effectively, a completely new product embedded in it and have a feature for feature match with every mature NLE out there. However, I'm willing to bet that by around release 14 the NLE is going to be on par with the best out there.

For some people that's too long to wait, so they'll just keep making round trips from Premiere or whoever. Those like me whose needs don't exceed the current feature will be okay with what's in 12. As you alluded to, the key to being happy with this or any other product is having realistic expectations and then using the software accordingly or going with a different product.

To be honest there are quite a few people out of the professional colourist crowd on this forum who would say that resolve is far from good as a color tool. The amount of blobs and mistakes, things that are not organized well and lack of general common sence is just amazing with this program. Fair enough, it's hard to make a good program these days. It's complicated, i can understand that. But why do other products behave more logically and have less of these silly mistakes? Why does the foundrys nuke work when it says it does? Or after effects? And both of those are considerably more complicated programs than resolve. Python scripting, is available expressions are available. Where is all that? If you can't do a good job let people write code to fix the problems. Is it about the yearly support fee? I would happily pay a support fee for resolve if that would guarantee that BM support would fix the current issues that i'm having and work with me on the new ones. I use the damn thing every day for grading and i'm seriously considering ditching it for nuke and LUE grading node. It would be fine for shortform.


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I've never seen software that was problem free. Premiere is a much more mature NLE, but was the single most unstable application of any kind that I've ever encountered. After Effects is very cool in terms of functionality, and it only crashed on occasional overnight renders. I was using Cakewalk long before it became Sonar. As a midi app, it was world class. As an audio app it was embarrassing. I've run Pro Tools, Nuendo, Cubase, etc. I could write long lists of problems with all of them.

I don't have any interest in being a professional apologist for these guys. It's not my company. I was just pointing out that most shops are pretty screwed up, some more than others. I haven't had Bmd products very long so maybe these guys are a complete disaster. I just don't know. However, if it turns out that they are, I'll simply switch products. Anything else is just tilting at windmills.

thanks chris for this very extensive answer!

i was really curious how an expert like like you perceives this issue. your answers and well structured analysis looks very interesting to me.

i'm also somehow familiar with this kind of work. but like most of my film related activities, which do not fit very well into the usual categories and expectations of professional colorists, my background in software development will look very strange none less. i also spend most of the recent decades by realizing very specialized software solutions for media art performances and computer infrastructure.

sure -- my roots in photography and film production can be dated back even further. in the late 80ths i joined a film collective initiated by a quite famous and very radical documentary filmmaker and spend there some years as a kind of trainee. but low budget independent video and film production was much more unsatisfying at that time -- especially the visual quality of video seen through eyes coming from photography. that's why this cord of activities faded into the background for a while, before digital video let it become more attractive again some years ago.

the computer related side of my personality seamlessly linked my artistic efforts in the film to other fields of media art, when i came in contact with a group of other artists and technicians working on media performances, radio experiments and all kind of computer driven robotic and sound installations. a strange mixture of people, where everyone contributed different interests and expertise. i became the one, experimenting with this yet unacquainted new thing, called "internet". our performances, most of them realized in cooperation with the national broadcast service an often based on live interaction of participants in different parts of the word, became quite successful (e.g. "horizontal radio"). once asked to give a student presentation about all this network related stuff at my department of the university (the humanities), i set up a computer build of old worthless junk and installed the content of a few floppy disks containing (pre 1.0) linux and a web and sendmail server for demonstration purposes. the lecture was very funny and successful, but we forgot to shutdown the machine afterwards. so it became a little server, where i learned my first lessons as unix operator and few close friends got accounts too. but within a very short period of time, more and more students and teachers asked for access. it was so much more comfortable and unbureaucratic than the central mainframes. it didn't take long and it became on of the most important servers and computer labs at the campus. the head of the university finally accepted the state and agreed access to all our artistic activities in exchange for some form of responsibility and voluntary technical service. a few years later this became an autonomous institution: a kind of very specialized internet provider, data center and computer consultant, that connects the national academic computer network to art institutions and artists. that's the background where i developed very specialized software for more then twenty years. tools, that are often written from scratch, just to realize the specific needs and most crazy ideas of artistic projects. (e.g. graphical user interfaces, that allow musicians and conductors in different parts of the world to cooperate in realtime based on a variable score and defined rules by an composer etc.)

it's definitely not the most effective way to make big money. there is no sportscar in front of my bungalow, instead i still have to carry my beloved cyclecross bike four stories up to my bohemian attic rooms. but it's at least enough to be happy and feel confident.

i just wrote this [almost exhibitionistic] lines, because otherwise it has to sound unbelievable, that someone claims qualification in quite distant professions. but of course it can not be seen as representative for more usual work in film industry and software business. it's nothing more then a very small and unimportant niche. and as the world sometimes looks quite distorted from this strange point of view, i really liked your actual response or waltervolpattos usual contributions, illuminating very different aspects of a more common professional practice.

to many contemporaries it may sound very strange, that someone in this field can work for more then 25 years on serious projects strictly using only free open source software and operating systems and didn't miss anything. but for me that's simply true. apart from various software evaluations and help to customers using closed source software, resolve is more ore less the only exception i utilized regularly in the last years, although i'm now slowly drifting to nuke and flame as more attractive alternatives, because they fit much better in my usual working environment (=linux) and the way i like to customize tools.

that's probably another reason, why my attitude may look very strange to other people here in the forum. i'm simply not used to common expectations that others users share in this world of commercial software products. i can measure it only by standards of comparable complex free open source alternatives. sure -- something like resolve doesn't exist as free software, otherwise i wouldn't have chosen a closed source product. this lack of an sufficient free equivalent is a very significant indicator, that this other world isn't perfect by no means likewise. but even as a kind of stranger in consumer land, i'm able identify bugs and shortcomings and compare their handling in both worlds. in this respect i have to to deliver a damning indictment of resolve. really -- i admire many aspects of this software -- but in this respect it is much worse then average free software.

well -- asking for features can be very frustrating in the free software world too. if the responsible development team doesn't like your request, you simply will not see any change. but even that gets usually communicated in an open and comprehensible way. you could finally develop a solution yourself, but sometimes it even happens, that ready made contributions by participants get rejected by maintainers. that's definitely more frustrating, than getting no response to feature requests and bug reports in the commercial context.

there's no question that blackmagics management has to determine the route of resolves development. they are free to decide what's best from their point of view and no one will deny that. it's only irritating, that they are not willing to communicate their decisions and reasons in any way. in some cases i can understand strategic business rationales behind the silence, but much more often it simply looks utterly unnecessary and very disrespectful. it's a great pity, because this kind of communication can be very powerful to improve products. it was probably one of the keys to success behind the most remarkable open source projects.

we will see, if your expectations of release 14 will come true.
i do not share your optimism anymore. one or two years ago i would have seen it like you. i usually advised all my friends to try resolve and watch its progress. but in the meanwhile i ceased to act like this.
when blackmagic took over davinci and made resolve available to the masses, it was a very promising and meaningful signal. like most of us i felt a lot of sympathy for this courage. but now, a few years later, the signals point unmistakable in the opposite direction.
perhaps resolve will become a very successful simple to use moderate expensive product at the mac app store, but you will hardly find a real professional tool, as the one once welcomed. sure, many people will be happy about this other software too, and thats fine by me. it's just not the kind of tool i'm looking for.
the way how resolve is slowly changing it's orientation reminds me, that the real impact of 'free software' in the tradition of the GPL was not so much related to free beer ideology, but more targeting strategies to keep tools available and improvable to the users when software becomes successful and attractive to the business [again]. the price tag isn't so important in this context. if you use software for commercial work, it's usually worth the investment. and if you are not able to afford a legal license for spare time use, there are always other ways to get access. but that's not the point. significant freedom and flexibility can be realized in expensive commercial products just as well as in free gifts. some people will expect studio equipment compatible connectivity as sine qua non of 'professional' work, but others would rate the value of customization interfaces and technical documentation not any less. i never did expect that resolve would open much about their technical internals and become free software in a more consequent way, but i didn't foresee, that it will become such a perfect example of the opposite extreme.

so finally i have to summarize, that it doesn't look so much like an issue related to insufficient development resources to me, but more as the ramification of communication deficits. it's perfectly acceptable that some complex improvements take time, but it's not very useful to keep silence about any serious issue or feature request.

I am really not sure if this is what the original poster is looking for, but in the DaVinci user manual on page 191 the following steps are given to extract audio only.

"If there’s a video clip in the Media Storage browser that has audio you need, but you don’t want the
video component, you can use the Extract Audio command to create a self-contained audio clip
that you can then import into the Media Pool by itself.
To extract the audio from a media file:
1. Right-click a clip in the Media Storage browser and choose “Extract Audio.”
2. Click the Browse button in the the Extract Audio dialog to find another disk location for the
extracted clip.
3. Click “Extract.” The audio channels are extracted and written as a .WAV file to the selected
destination.
4. After you’ve extracted the stand-alone .WAV file, you’ll need to import it into the Media Pool
if you want to use it in your project."

Your development background sounds fun. It's nice to work without the constraints of money, allowing you to focus purely on the software. It is indeed a very different world than the one that I, and the Blackmagic folks, exist in.

The FOSS movement is admirable in their ideals and have given us things like Blender. Commercial companies face a much harsher reality and thus must operate based on different principles. How well they do things varies. I've never worked for a perfect company, nor seen one from afar. Then again, I've never seen a perfect human, either.

Your development background sounds fun. It's nice to work without the constraints of money, allowing you to focus purely on the software.

no -- the "constraints of money" are quite the same in more uncommon niches of art production. you also have to meet deadlines and the results have to work as expected. in this respect you will not find much difference to more common professional practice. it's just another kind of specialization and the careers will not obey the same rules as in other fields of work.

The FOSS movement is admirable in their ideals and have given us things like Blender. Commercial companies face a much harsher reality and thus must operate based on different principles. How well they do things varies.

i think, both sides can learn a lot from each other and benefit from cooperation. as a matter of fact resolve uses a lot of open source components in its software. i do not see, why it should work the other way around in a quite similar profitable way?

take ardour into account, a very advanced digital audio workstation, that represents a much more advanced solution for video sound mixing than resolve. it's creator (paul davis) had to choose very uncommon terms of distribution to face reality and make his living as an independent developer. it's a very interesting and well documented case of serious work in this field under real world constraints.

but again: it's not so much about cheap access, but technical excellence!

FYI, Smart Bins will do the search recursively, it's a reasonably efficient way of corralling footage via metadata, and would definitely do what you are looking for unless I'm misunderstanding...

I had a play with this today. Very helpful and I laid out some new bins (all ungraded, graded, by scene number), and it worked quite well so thank you. This sadly doesn't help me find a clip quickly by name or other metadata unless I create a bin first. And that seems ridiculous. Find should work for that. Since Smart bins can do it, we KNOW the data is available to be searched. Also, unless I am missing something, it does not appear the smart bins can be nested like normal bins. That is going to be a nightmare on big projects.

Again, not such a problem for grading sessions for onlines, but for doing dailies/Asst, editor duties/editor duties, it's pretty painful.

Lack of audio export is a buzzkill for sure. Gotta say, not many people use Resolve as a creative editing tool just yet, so developers are likely getting less feedback in that area.

One of the things I really like about Avid (the company) is how much feedback the solicit from their pro users. They reach out on numerous social media platforms. They have a very active forum that is monitored daily. They are on Linkedin. They have people out in the field working with editors and asst. editors at big shops. They are in the trenches with their pros to see how they can improve the product and what works and doesn't work in a REAL work environment. They certainly have their faults but listening to customers is not one of them. They have had decades to get here though.

Resolve is a mature online grading system. If it were me in charge, and I wanted to increase the editing capabilities, I would have sat down with my customers, solicited their feedback, and done a complete inventory of the pro editing software out there. Avid has the best trimming and media organization tools in the market. How are they doing that? Adobe has the best vertical integration in the business. How are they doing that. etc. Learn from the hard work of others. It's hard when you are starting from zero like Avid and Lightworks had to do. 20 years on, it's not that difficult to solicit the advice of pros and scan the market to select a direction to go. I am not expecting Resolve to bolt on Avid level editing. But honestly, I do expect the "find" to work.

I know Resolve wants to be an NLE, but it's lagging behind for many reasons. It was developed as a color correction system by a company that did nothing but color correction systems (DaVinci).

I prefer the specialized tools. Do what you are best at. However, when BMD bought Resolve, and became a camera company, they saw an opportunity. Can't blame them for that. But for the love of god, don't put out marketing material that your new NLE is ready for primetime when it's really just beyond beta level. Yes, it can do slips and slides, and asymetric cuts. And that's awesome. But what does it matter when I can't organize my project like I want? And performance is horrible. I can cut a 2k project in Avid on my laptop with a USB3 drive and it moves like it's on steroids. I can try to cut a 1080p/24 project in resolve with 32GB of RAM, Thunderbolt drives, and a new Quadro card, and it feels like I'm working in slow motion. And that's before any grading is done.

For a few years now Resolve has featured more and more NLE functions, but its priority has been finishing - online style editing, color correction, final delivery, and that's completely fine by me. There are plenty of features that I feel need improving / implementing on that side of things before creative editing.

Fine by me too. Just today, I found myself scratching my head at why I could not type a value into boxes below the color wheels. I was cutting multiple takes of a scene and simply wanted to put in exactly the same values as the previous take. But you have to fiddle with the scroll wheels. Again, this shouldn't be so hard.

Metadata manipulation & filtering is a different story, and I think that's a place Resolve could really learn a thing or two from Avid, and I think DITs and dailies folks would really appreciate Avid & Colorfront levels of metadata manipulation / ease.

Agreed. The only reason I find myself in this position is because I can't bring my BM camera RAW files into Avid. Because there's no AMA. So Resolve becomes my first stop. I had foolishly thought it could be my one stop for everything, but after cutting a few shows in Resolve, I realize that I will have to roundtrip for the foreseeable future if I want to maintain the few hairs I have left on my head.

I am really not sure if this is what the original poster is looking for, but in the DaVinci user manual on page 191 the following steps are given to extract audio only.

Thanks, Sunil.

That's a quick and elegant solution if the audio in the footage is the same as what you need. In my case, I have to convert from 16 audio tracks (HyperDeck footage) to 1 stereo track before Resolve will playback correclty. I can do that in the clip attributes once it's added to the timeline, but if I want to then get audio only in a stereo wav I have to either render the resulting video and then perform your step on that video, or just use the ffmpeg trick on the original source footage.

Nonetheless, this is a nice option to have when I'm working with footage that already has audio in a format that plays nice with Resolve, and one I'd overlooked. Appreciate the tip!

I am really not sure if this is what the original poster is looking for, but in the DaVinci user manual on page 191 the following steps are given to extract audio only.

This option is not longer in DR12.1, at least it is not available in the Media Storage as stated in the manual. Unless I'm missing something.

This option is not longer in DR12.1, at least it is not available in the Media Storage as stated in the manual. Unless I'm missing something.

I'm running 12.2, so perhaps that's the difference.