Blackmagic Forum

In Project Manager, please allow us to select multiple projects (or a folder) and then "Export Project Archive". Right now you have to do it one by one for each project. Kind of a pain!

This would be especially helpful when moving files off to a secondary storage to save space. You might do this type of maintenance activity every month or so when your storage is running low. And then it's quite tedious to repeat this process for each project individually.

I think a lot of users need to work with media in one location, and then later move it somewhere else due to storage constraints.... so it would be lovely to make managing this process easier.

I think your mindset here is...less than ideal.

Your Media storage should be sufficient for all concurrent projects. If you need more, get more. Never try to "save space".

Once a project has final approval, just delete the media. (Because you already have it backed up elsewhere as a first step, even before copying it to your working Media location.)

This puts YOU in control, and can solve your problem now, without waiting for BMD to change anything.

First my storage is easily sufficient for handling many current projects. I never said that was an issue.

Second, well, it seems your mindset isn’t quite ideal either… Because what if you want to go back later (even after final approval) and modify the original project? How would you handle that situation? In my scenario I can easily do that by opening up the project archive.

It seems like the reason DaVinci Resolve having an “Export project archives” feature… is to be able to have an archive.

And anyway, everything you mentioned does not (from what I can see) subtract from the idea it would be a nice feature to be able to perform this action in bulk.

MagicMind wrote:Second, well, it seems your mindset isn’t quite ideal either… Because what if you want to go back later (even after final approval) and modify the original project? How would you handle that situation? In my scenario I can easily do that by opening up the project archive.

We just keep all the last six months' worth of projects on line if at all possible. Only after that do we start archiving them to external drives and LTO tapes. We only guarantee to the client that we'll hold on to the project for 90 days.

I think at the moment we have about 600TB of storage in the room, not all of which is online at any one time, but I can walk over and hook it up when I need to. I rarely Media Manage projects more than once a week or so, but it does happen. The truncated version of the project is relatively easy to store; one project (memorably) went from 22TB down to about 3TB. Storing 3TB is pretty easy.

MagicMind wrote:I think a lot of users need to work with media in one location, and then later move it somewhere else due to storage constraints.... so it would be lovely to make managing this process easier.

Yes for sure. I have working storage (10 Gbe NAS @ 48TB) and then archival storage which doesn't need to be fast it needs to have multiple levels of redundancy. They have different use cases and bulk exporting project archives would be fantastic to have.

+1