HOW TO: Do edit-While-Ingest with MovieRecorder (Express) and Blackmagic-Design DaVinci Resolve

DISCLAIMER: This information is provided without guarantee. We are not the coders of DaVinci Resolve, so we can not vouch for its behaviour. We can of course vouch for MovieRecorder's behaviour. If you experience issues with growing media in DaVinci Resolve, you should contact your Blackmagic-Design representative. Our files are generated in a "standard" way, and have been working fine since a few years, so there is no reason they would stop working. Of course you can always contact us, and we will try to help, but if the issue is that your file does not grow in DaVinci Resolve, it's important to check with them too.

Warning ! We have seen some issues with growing media in DaVinci Resolve , particularly when reading from SMB drives.  Files may not grow in Resolve, and when they do, they can have some missing frames, and missing audio. When this happens, you may have to quit and restart DaVinci Resolve. Blackmagic-Design should look into this.

1. Which type of destination ? ️

When you create a new destination with MovieRecorder, you can select a QuickTime or MXF destination.

DaVinci Resolve supports growing media only with QuickTime files, not with MXF.

Then once you have created your QuickTime destination, there are 2 other settings to consider:

• the "Edit-while Ingest" setting (None, Segmented or Classic). You can read more about the different type of destinations here. 
• the "File Type" setting (mov, mp4 or m4v) - mp4 and m4v only available in Segmented.

And finally, depending on the type of storage that you use, some destinations will be recommended. 

Here's a table of what we have seen to be working.*

* Results may vary depending on storage type, macOS version, editing software version, and other variables, this is subject to change, and we recommend testing with a free demo version of MovieRecorder.

** We have seen that Classic movies do grow in Resolve, but sometimes, when getting close to live, we can see frames where Resolve would say "Media Offline". And this would not go away immediately, making it difficult to work with. 

*** Tested on QNAP and Synology

2. Configure DaVincci Resolve

In Resolve, open "Settings > Decode Option", and enable the "Automatically refresh growing files in the media pool" option:

3. How to work with growing media in DaVinci Resolve

While in theory, the files should be growing in the "Media Pool", we have seen that this was not the case in version 18.5.1, unless we right-clicked on the "Location" and selected "Refresh". To work with these "growing media", we recommend to place them in a timeline, and in "Edit", extend them when they grow.

For example, in the screenshot below, the red line at the end shows that there is no more media:

But then once the file has grown (Resolve will refresh every 60 seconds), the red line will turn green showing that there is extra content:

Then simply drag the end of the clip to extend it.