Media Management turns timeline into a mess

Short story:
One of many great features in Resolve is the option to take a big project and export only the final timeline and the clips/portion of the clips used in that timeline.
For me this is an essential feature since I have loads of clips that are longer than 20 minutes and less than 10 seconds is used (wildlife recordings waiting for the right moment).
This easily adds up to more than a TB for an entire project, and unlike FCP where you can only export the entire clips, Resolve lets you export the portion of the media used and even gives you the option to add handles.
This makes it possible for me to save the project for later exports/minor edits and to have access to the original footage at a fraction of the HD space.

I really love this feature but sadly it is not usable in its current state:
While it works almost flawless when using ProRes it often fails with h264 and h265 footage, which I use the most.

Problem:
I am using the "Timeline" and "copy" function and I am selecting only the portions of the clips used with 30 frames handles.
It does seem to copy everything to a folder including the timelines, and I am able to open the timelines in a new project - but that is when things start to become a mess.

At first glance it all looks great, but then when zooming in on the timeline (in this case a 45 minutes video) red portions are showing up. Some of them are "Media Offline" while other are "Missing Media".
I am able to restore some of the clips from the media pool, but some of them are missing or the file copied is too short.

The total mess reveal itself when I start to playback the movie. Audio from one clip is playing on a different clips and things are in general switched around.

I have tested the feature on two projects now and the exact same thing happens.

Maybe this is not directly related to the version 20, but nevertheless it would be great to get the fundamentals of this great software working before adding too many new feature.

All the best
Morten

Wild guess? Does your media have unique timecode? Also, are the file names unique? I'm thinking that maybe Resolve is getting confused with the copied clips because of either/or timecode or file name collisions.

Wild guess? Does your media have unique timecode? Also, are the file names unique? I'm thinking that maybe Resolve is getting confused with the copied clips because of either/or timecode or file name collisions.

Thanks a lot for your input. It is kind of you to take your time.
No I am not using timecode but my footage is all renamed with unique names.
The reason for not using a timecode device for all cameras is the fact that I am a one-man band using three cameras in the field while I do nature recordings.
For everything else, timecode is not necessary in my workflow and it will add more devices as far as I know.

And to clarify, I am not opening the project in another program. I am opening in resolve.
All the best.

Hi Morten - I asked because I have read that Resolve can have trouble with source media that either does not have timecode at all or has duplicated timecode. I don't have personal experience with the failure you have described but perhaps someone else on the forum will chime-in with their own stories of how media management might fail in this way. Cheers.

I will once again post my Media Management tips. All these workarounds function for the way we use Resolve:

1) limit your session to just the files actually used in the session (that is, make sure no unnecessary files are sitting in bins)

2) compressed Long-GOP files like H.264 / H.265 don't work well for post because they generally lack embedded frame-based timecode. If you're forced to use them anyway, my advice is not to trim them. [If you convert these files to ProRes 422 or DNxHR SQX, those files can be trimmed more easily.]

3) Render-in-Place all JPG, TIFF, and PNG graphics clips to ProRes or DNxHR so that now the clips have embedded timecode and (preferably) unique file names

4) avoid 44.1kHz audio source files (especially MP3) -- convert them in advance to 48kHz / 24-bit WAV files instead

5) for camera clips with embedded audio, my opinion is you're better off if you strip the sound out as a separate WAV file that lives in the session

6) be aware that Titles can be a bit dodgy and don't always survive the changeover with Media Management. (I would say the same thing with Fusion sequences, which I would render out and treat as a separate transcoded element.)

7) high frame rate (slo-mo) footage can be a problem because the timecode isn't predictable or easily trimmable. Handle those as VFX shots and render them in place first.

8) be wary of PROXY FILES cluttering up your timeline. Make sure that all the files are legitimate camera raw files (assuming that's what you want), because otherwise that's a guaranteed fail.

9) if you choose to trim files, you MUST check off Relink to New Files, because the old names will not relink to this new session. When in doubt, do a Save-As and do all the Media Management in a copy of your original session.

The simpler you make your session, the better the potential for successful Media Management. The moment you have a filename clash or a timecode conflict, it can fail. Resolve 19 & 20 now have a feature where if Media Management stumbles during the TRIM process, it will just copy over the entire clip (rather than failing), which I think is a good compromise.

When in doubt: copy over the entire clip and trim it later, if there's an issue. If your file copying is failing for another reason, try Nikolai Waldman's Resolve Collect and I bet it'll get you at least 98% there without errors. His program has been a lifesaver for me over the last 6-7 years.

http://www.niwa.nu/resolve-collect/

Another possibility (which I haven't tried) is EditSpy for Windows:

http://edlspy.felixhuesken.de/

Thanks a lot for the feedback and advice Marc.
I have already read your guide as I was trying to find a solution.
I posted my suggestion to “fix” this media management function in the hope of getting it to function properly without having to basically go through a long list of transcoding, stripping audio, rendering etc.
If one have to convert h265 and h264 into ProRes to be able to use the trim function, the whole point in trimming goes away since you will end up with a larger archive.

While workarounds are really helpful it would be so great if BMD could improve this functionality to work as intended or at least come up with an error when things are not copied / archived properly.

Anyway, thanks a lot for taking your time to post a guide to a temporary solution Mark.

All the best
Morten

I posted my suggestion to “fix” this media management function in the hope of getting it to function properly without having to basically go through a long list of transcoding, stripping audio, rendering etc. If one have to convert h265 and h264 into ProRes to be able to use the trim function, the whole point in trimming goes away since you will end up with a larger archive.

That's my advice. I get that you may not like the advice, but... I'm not wrong. What I advise will actually work.

My complaint for years is that Long-GOP H.264/H.265 formats were intended for delivery, not for editing use. My advice would be the same for the people using Premiere or Avid or anything else. Workflow is a tough chore. If you wind up with a larger archive... my advice is to buy bigger drives.

Sadly, I made media management with proxys in it. I´m having issues to reconnect media. I have offline files and files reconnected to wrong timecodes. I´would apreciate any advice to fix this mess.

Kind regards.