Media Management issue / or is it a feature request?

So, I've got an unusual situation, but I bet it's not entirely unique:

I have a hundred or so hours of dailies spread across multiple archive drives. Dailies were made, collected, and a sizzle reel (trailer) was cut, using material from all across the project. To online/grade the sizzle, I need to 'collect' the shots from all the archives to my high-speed raid. obviously, I can't put the entirety of the source material onto the fast raid.

The 'media manage' feature, however, cannot add to a 'collection,' as near as I can figure out. So, each time I mount an archive (or two at a time!) I have to re-consolidated all the media that's also on the already 'collected' drive, duplicating it into the new collection... until, eventually, I have all the raw dailies in one place.

Seems like there should be a more elegant way to handle this situation. Sure, buying a massive single drive for the archive material would make it easier, but that's not exactly cost-effect.

Hi, Greg. I would do it this way:

1) look at the USAGE column in the media page for all the clips.

2) select all, right click, and choose "Update Usage Data."

3) delete all the unused clips. (If you're concerned about this, do this in a dupe of the project session.)

4) Now use Media Management to collect only the used media to a different drive. This can work. Make sure you check "Relink to new files" in the option. You can choose to trim the files if you wish, and this can work though I think it's a little buggy with Red files. It's flawless with ProRes and MXF files.)

Another possible choice is Nikolai Waldman's Resolve Collect, which has a few different features but also can work with a DRP to place all used media from a session into a single place:

http://www.niwa.nu/2013/06/collect-sour ... e-collect/

I maybe didn't explain myself well enough, or maybe I don't understand your suggestion?

The source material is DNG: hours-long recordings from multiple cameras, so it's impossible, without a massive raid, to have all RAW the media online at one time. (Part way through the shoot/archive process we switched from 4tb mini-raids to 16tb mini raids to help stave off this problem.)

If I had the project to start over, I would of invested in a raid to archive ALL the raw footage, but that ship has sailed.

I did discover that I can copy w/handles individual clips into the consolidated 'directory' (collection) so that takes a little of the pain away.