Reducing size of source clips

A newbie question: I am filming wildlife and sometimes record fairly lengthy clips waiting for the action to occur.
In Resolve, when editing, I may trim the long original clip down to a small portion of the original source clip. However the original source clip still sits on my hard drive in its original length.
This original source clip is very large and takes up quite a bit of space on my hard drive. Is there someway that the original source clip can be reduced to the portion I want to use so that the file size is reduced and I'm not wasting storage space on a video clip, only a small part of which I end up using?

John Giatropoulos

This would really depend on what format you're shooting in. If it's something like h.264 then tons of third party software could do this (without re-encoding).

If you're talking BRAW then you're going to be limited to just BMD's software. I've never done this personally but it looks like Resolve does have a way to re-export trimmed BRAW content:

Thank you! I will search for those 3rd party software applications. I shoot in H.264 and 265

Wow! How embarrasing to find out there's an app right in Windows that will do what I want.

The only caveat with the windows one is I don't know if it'll keep the same encoding settings (and just copy the data stream under the hood). I'd trust resolve to do a better job of not degrading the video by re-encoding it again. From what I read it looks like that feature I shared above works on h.264 as well.

You're right - just tried the PICTURES app in Windows and it changed the frame rate and some other stuff I don't understand well enough, so I'll continue to search. I'm guessing that people who film wildlife/birds etc and have to wade through long video clips must have figured this out or have monster storage capacity and just do the trimming/editing of the long clip in Resolve. One app I found but haven't tried yet claims to be lossless and you don't need to re-render, so that sounds promising. I suppose one solution is to keep the clips short, but then I may risk missing some fleeting action while I'm stopping the video and restarting a new clip.

Mike, I decided to ask Black Magic support about this and they provided an absolutely amazing reply. Go to page 838 of the manual about Media Management. Resolve already has built in what I was looking for. Continues to surprise me!

I keep recommending Media Management again and again. It's surprising how few people use it.

Uli = where do we find this? My manual does not have a page823 and no heading for Media Management. I am guessing it is in Resolve, but, I use FCPX. However, this would almost be enough for me to switch.

It is under the File menu>Media Management

Uli = where do we find this? My manual does not have a page823 and no heading for Media Management. I am guessing it is in Resolve, but, I use FCPX. However, this would almost be enough for me to switch.

If all you want to do is reduce the length of clips, you can just use QuickTime Player with the Trim command. It works with ProRes Raw which is very useful (and Resolve can't do that of course). It won't work with files that QuickTime Player can't open obviously so BRAW would need Resolve. I'm not saying don't switch to Resolve but it would be an extremely steep learning curve just to trim clips.

I keep recommending Media Management again and again. It's surprising how few people use it.

Yep! I once asked this exact question and Uli gave me the hint to check media management and made my day!

My workflow to clean up my source footage:
- Put everything into one bin.
- Go to the cutpage, choose "source bin".
- Walk through all my footage, set in & outpoints & click "append" for every snippet I want to keep.
- Go to "media management", select "Timeline" and let Resolve do it's job.