Peter Chamberlain wrote:We had examples of projects with 100s of timelines with 20,000 clips and calculating usage for that combination is non trivial
Thank you for the response, Peter. For what it's worth, Premiere (generally a far inferior product IMO) has been able to do this for at least 7 years so I'm not sure I completely buy the argument that it's non-trivial. Perhaps the way you guys are implementing it makes it difficult but there is evidently a simpler way to do it and I hope you can pursue it.
I think perhaps there's a slight gap in understanding as to why editors in particular need this. I understand why - Resolve was built for grading, which means that it's based on the idea of having a small number of master timelines and that's really all that matters. However, for editing, particularly larger projects, we often need lots of timelines. Stringouts timelines, sync maps, selects timelines, scenes in progress, alternative versions, etc.
Keeping track of where a particular clip has been used is essential in this context. I can see in the usage column that a clip might have been used 3 times, but that still doesn't tell me where - have I used it in a version I've sent to a client or was it just in a selects timeline and a couple of test edits I worked on? The only way to answer that question it to open every single timeline until I find the three that contained that clip, which as you're aware could involve hundreds of timelines. In Premiere I just highlight the clip in the bin and there's a drop down menu that lists every timeline the clip appears in. Simple.
I need to stress that this isn't just about working out
if a clip has been used. It's about
how a clip has been used.
People have been requesting this for a number of years. We really need Blackmagic to understand why it's so important.