Blackmagic Forum

When I first created a project, I imported photos that were in both .HEIC and JPG format and videos that were in both .MOV and MP4 format, and everything worked just fine. But when I came back to the project a few hours later, all of the .HEIC and .MOV were all offline. I could find them using the "Reveal In Finder" command,on my external hard drive, but they would not go to "on line" media. I know how to change the .HEIC files to JPG, but I don't know how to change the .MOV files to MP4. The .MOV files all came from my iPhone and the usable MP4 files all came from my video camera. Is there some way within DaVinci to convert the .MOV files to .MP4 and the .HEIC files to JPEG. The .HEIC files are ones that I imported into my Mac from my iPhone using airdrop. It's fast.

I don't know if makes any difference, but I imported all the media following the suggestion in the tutorial on the "Edit Page"

Moved to DaVinci Forum

You can re-wrap the footage from mp4 into mov with free programs like Shutter Encoder.
It's fast and lossless, worth a try. BUT, phone footage can be problematic since it has no constant frame rate.

I shut my computer off and restarted it. This was recommended to me in another forum post where I was asking about transitions not sticking. When I turned my computer on, all the off line photos and videos were now online. I hope that is all it takes in the future. I didn't know that frame rates weren't consistent with phones.

Sounds like your external hard drive went to sleep. Resolve reacts badly to any hardware going offline.

See if you can turn off power management for external hard drives.

thanks for the info. I have to use my hard drive because of lack of space on my Mac Book. Any idea how to turn the external hard drive on an off while it is attached to a Mac Book Pro?

grant.cahoon wrote:thanks for the info. I have to use my hard drive because of lack of space on my Mac Book. Any idea how to turn the external hard drive on an off while it is attached to a Mac Book Pro?

there might be an option for "drives never going to sleep" somewhere in the OS settings....

On Mac: System Preferences > Energy Saver

Peter Cave wrote:On Mac: System Preferences > Energy Saver

Tnanks, I'm not familiar with Mac os

Uli Plank wrote:You can re-wrap the footage from mp4 into mov with free programs like Shutter Encoder.
It's fast and lossless, worth a try. BUT, phone footage can be problematic since it has no constant frame rate.

Hi,

First off, thanks for the tip on Shutter Encoder. Great little app!!

I converted some video footage from a Samsung phone, to fixed framerate ProRes and DDNxHD as a test, but the filesize billows up almost ten-fold.
I understand the frame/filesize for these formats, but didn't expect the conversion for this to happen to the files.
is this to be expected?

thanks!

rob

robwuijster wrote:I converted some video footage from a Samsung phone, to fixed framerate ProRes and DDNxHD as a test, but the filesize billows up almost ten-fold.
I understand the frame/filesize for these formats, but didn't expect the conversion for this to happen to the files.
is this to be expected?

Yes. Because you converted it to a different and much lower compression format. What Uli suggested was just re-wrapping it into a different container, but I very much suspect that would still cause you problems since it would still be variable frame rate, which Resolve has trouble dealing with.

Re-wrapping doesn't change the actual video data, so the file size will be similar, it will be exactly the same quality, and it will be quite quick to convert. But the frame rate and bit rate don't change, obviously.

There are so many options when it comes to video files that it can be very daunting at the beginning.

Basically, as far as Resolve is concerned the less compressed a file is, the easier Resolve can deal with it, but that comes with a considerable file size disadvantage. To an extent. At some point the file size gets large enough that the speed of the hard drive may have an impact.

What I do is experiment with different bit rates to find the best compromise for me.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the confirmation on the file sizes. It makes sense just thinking full conversion or just 'changing the wrapper'.

I do feel that v17 is way more sensitive on this 'media offline' issue, as I have never had this with v16 on the same projects with footage that comes from different sources, frame rates and different disks.

cheers!

rob

None of this explains why the "Media Offline" messages appear seemingly at random, only to disappear by themselves. Sometimes.