top of page
Writer's picturePiseth POV

First steps with DaVinci Resolve, (Databases, Projects)

Updated: Apr 13, 2020

PROJECT MANAGER




  • In this windows you can see DaVinci Resolve projects, and folders containing projects.


  • At the bottom you can see the button New Project.

It seems when can go ahead, click there, and create a new project, but hold on!


This projects, where are they being saved?

In other programs, like Premiere Pro, we create a project, we name it, and we choose a location in our system to save it.


DaVinci Resolve does this differently.


WELCOME TO DAVINCI RESOLVE DATABASES


In DaVinci Resolve, projects are stored in what we call a database (DaVinci Resolve Database). The database exists in particular location in our system, that must be aware of.


Everything we do, every project we create, is stored inside this database.

Let’s go step by step!


DaVinci Resolve has default database. To access your databases, you click in the icon marked here:


Now you can see, left of the Project Manager, the databases of my system.


I have a couple.


The marked one is then one active in this moment:



If you never did anything, you will only see one database, the default one.


To know its location, right click on it, and lick on Open File Location, for example.


You will see this database is in a folder in your system, in your main hard-drive.


To simplify, specially if you are starting, you could just have this default database, and start crating projects in it. So, when you create projects, you don’t need to worry any more about where to save them. Everything is sabed in that database.


But, what if one day you need take a DaVinci Resolve project from one computer to another computer?


This will be, of course, possible. From one database, we can select a project to export it (as a DaVinci Resolve Project .drp), and then, in another computer, we can import that project, in another database, so we can work it with it. I looks complicated, but it’s actually not once you get used to this design. I will post tutorials about project management in the future.


Everything I said so far is what I recommend to start.


Now you know DaVinci Resolve has a database, and projects you create are stored/saved in it.


That said: it’s possible to create additional databases.

For example: instead of working with the default database, you could create your own new database, in a folder/location or your interest, like an external hard-drive. This would allow you to go with that database, and the projects in it, from computer to computer.


HOW TO CREATE A NEW DATABASE


To add a new database to the system, click in New Database:



Then:



  1. Click the option Create.

  2. Select the option Disk. This creates the database in a folder in a disk. No saseguramos de tener activada la opción Disk. More about the other kind of databases, PostgreSQL, in future articles.

  3. Name the database. Upper-case and spaces are not permitted.

  4. Choose a folder in your system. Not possible to select just a hard-drive. You need to create at least an empty folder.

  5. Click Create.

This generates a new database.  You will see it now in your databases list.


When you have more than one database, you need to select one to work with it, double-clicking.


It’s important to understand this: when are in one particular database, you can NOT see any projects created in other databases.


The active database in the image below is “monday”. In this one, I can’t see any of the other projects I created in the other database, “resolve_project_database”:



Why all this?


If you work for different clientes, you could, for example, create one database per client. This way, no client would be able to see or open projects from another client.


The way I do it is: I use at least two different databases, one for my workshops, and another one for my personal projects. So, when I’m playing around and creating projects in my courses, I make sure my personal projects are safe, because I can’t access them from my “workshops” database.


Also, just one big database with hundreds and hundreds of projects in it, is not a good idea. It’s better to work in smaller units.


Once we select a particular database to work, now we can go the right panel of the Project Manager, and click New Project, or New Folder, if we wish to organise our projects in folders:




For example: if you wish to work with just the default DaVinci Resolve Database, you could create folders, one per client/type of work, and inside each folder create the desired projects.


When we click New Project, the project is generated, and we enter the DaVinci Resolve inter-face:




If we need to go back to the Project Manager, for example to create another project, or to load a different database, we click in the home icon, bottom-right:


MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT MANAGER


There two ways to display projects: icons, and list.

This is icons, where we can also move the marked slider to make them bigger or smaller:



We can also use the list mode.

This displays columns, with useful information, like Date of Creation:





27 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page