"Cleaning" a DaVinci Resolve Workstation

[Frank Wylie]

(advance apologies, this has been cross-posted to several other DaVinci related boards)

Anyone know of a good reference for "cleaning" or properly deleting projects and associated files from a DaVinci Resolve Workstation when storage becomes a problem?

Of course, you could just reformat everything and re-install, but...

There is scant little in the manual about this aspect of maintaining a busy workstation with less than unlimited storage capacity (networked or otherwise).

What are your methods and/or tips?  How often do you dump the system and reload everything from the OS up? 

[Thomas Singh]

Hi Frank!

I never delete projects as they are only reference files and doesn't take up that much space. I just organize them in folders for years/months etc. I run a backup now and then and include stills.

Backup of footage is regulated in the contracts with our clients, but we usually keep it available on disks in 6 months only. For long term availability we have found that it's most cost effective (and safe) to save footage on LTO tapes, but that's just an extra service that our client pays for. In most cases it's more than enough to have a high resolution copy of the offline available on tape.

 

Thomas 

[Frank Wylie]

2 hours ago, Thomas Singh said:

Hi Frank!

I never delete projects as they are only reference files and doesn't take up that much space. I just organize them in folders for years/months etc. I run a backup now and then and include stills.

Backup of footage is regulated in the contracts with our clients, but we usually keep it available on disks in 6 months only. For long term availability we have found that it's most cost effective (and safe) to save footage on LTO tapes, but that's just an extra service that our client pays for. In most cases it's more than enough to have a high resolution copy of the offline available on tape.

 

Thomas 

Thanks, Thomas.

How do you manage the gallery and screen grabs?  Do you place them in the custom folders for each job?

Seems like they could choke up a HDD very quickly if you use them a lot.

[Bruno Mansi]

Resolve has a number of tools for backing up your project. You can use the media management tool to copy the entire project media to a new location or drive, or you can just copy the media used in one (or all) of your timelines, adding any handles you may require.

You can then backup your project using File/Export Project, which will give you options about saving stills, LUTs etc used in your project.

[Thomas Singh]

21 hours ago, Frank Wylie said:

Thanks, Thomas.

How do you manage the gallery and screen grabs?  Do you place them in the custom folders for each job?

Seems like they could choke up a HDD very quickly if you use them a lot.

I usually have a gallery bin with work stills that I delete when the grade is set. For archiving I only keep the key grade stills, typically the master shots of each scene / the wide shots and sometimes some closer shots if I used more than 30 seconds to tweek them. 

Edited November 16, 2016 by Thomas Singh

[Marc Wielage]

Walter Volpatto from Fotokem has a good method that I think makes sense: when you start a new project, create a new folder just for the Gallery stills and scratch disk, with the name of that project. Later on, when you move on to a new project, you can choose to delete that folder or archive it or do whatever you need to do.