How to work with multifile clips?

I am quite new to resolve and I am totally stuck with organizing my footage in Resolve prior to even starting the edit process, any suggestions highly appreciated.

My first step after the media import process is to automatically copy all the EXIF data into clip metadata so I can use their properties in my smartbins, this works really well. But as I am editing documentaries the takes can be quite long and contain multiple angles. The cameras that were used to produce the footage are splitting takes into multiple files due to file system limitations and so I was expecting that I cold simply join the files to a compound clip (preferrably even automatically as it is very easy for editing software to detect split files).

But I realize that according to the documentation I have to create a timeline, insert the split clips/files and then make a compound clip that I can then reuse in the media pool. Theoretically this is ok, but practically this feature is useless for me as the new compound clips have lost all their attributes. There is no metadata so my smartbins don't work and even worse all physical properties (resolution) of the footage are not visible any more as the new compound clips inherit the project settings by default. I tried to copy the metadata back to the compound clips, but it seems that this is not supported by Resolve.

What is the proper way to work with multifile clips in Resolve? This should be a no brainer that is fully automated, but I can't see what I am doing wrong.

it is very easy for editing software to detect split files

That depends on the recording format. QuickTime, for example, can't do this, whereas MP4 can.

One option you might consider is creating a new file with all clips joined into one - exporting a Cineform AVI or DNx MXF file, for example.

I thought of a software logic that simply looks at the timestams or timecode of the files, if there are clips from the same camera that have 0 seconds between them there is a high chance that they are part of a multifile clip. I was not aware that this depends on the format used.

Thank you for the suggestion, but your answer actually scares me as it probably means that I am not doing anything wrong and Resolve indeed has no support for multifile clips. And after some searching on the forum I found a post that confirms that metadata cannot be copied between clips.

For me this is a showstopper, as I highly depend on EXIF data being available in my clips. The extra work to manually group the files on a custom timeline, exporting the result and then to manually reenter the metadata for new compound clip is huge.

I guess I have to think about writing a script to implement what I need. Or maybe do this outside Resolve with ffmpeg.

It's actually metadata written by the camera that's used for Clip Spanning.

QuickTime (.mov) simply doesn't support that, regardless of software.

I highly depend on EXIF data being available in my clips.

Resolve doesn't support that, I'm afraid.

Best approach (in theory, haven't tried) is probably merging the clips using ffmeg, or a ffmeg front-end like Shutter Encoder, and then copying the EXIF data from the original to the merged copy, with EXIFTOOL.

And then see whether Resolve is happy with the result....

Hi John, Shutter Encoder is actually a great option, but it does not copy the metadata when merging files. I have asked Paul to consider a copy metadata flag in future releases.

But you are right, FFmpeg and ExifTool are needed to do what I want. I currently use ExifTool to copy EXIF data into Resolve Metadata and so it seems that my scripting journey will not end here