Blackmagic Cloud Collaboration in DaVinci Resolve 18

Learn how easy it is to set up and use DaVinci Resolve 18's Cloud Project Libraries to share projects and edit videos remotely with your team. This fast and comprehensive tutorial covers it all!

Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve 18 lets multiple editors, colorists, Fusion artists, and audio engineers work together in REAL-TIME on the SAME PROJECT. No matter where you are in the world. It works with a new PROJECT LIBRARY that stores the project files hosted on the brand new Blackmagic cloud.

But what's so cool about this new workflow is that it's dead simple to set up and use. You don't need to know anything about IT, so you can keep on editing anywhere, even in your underwear.

We're gonna blaze through this multi-user collaboration tutorial with help from my friend Jeff, who is a professional colorist working from home. You'll get to see the power of getting rid of the whole conform process and how you can work together to crank out BETTER FASTER work.

Blackmagic ID Setup

Create a FREE user account for Blackmagic cloud to get started. This is how the system can track who's making each change to a project. You can sign up and log in directly from the Blackmagicdesign.com webpage in the upper right. 

You can even do this workflow with the free version of DaVinci Resolve 18. How crazy is that?! 

Just one person needs to spend five dollars a month to "own" the project library. This helps cover the hosting fees, which I don't mind paying because this is so much simpler than using the older PostgreSQL shared database over the internet. And you would've had to pay amazon web services for that anyways. So just five bucks for just one person.

However, at any time, you can click this new "copy to" button to copy the project back to a local disk database, also NOW KNOWN as a local project library. And then, you can cancel your monthly five-dollar fee if you don't need collaboration anymore. And you don't lose any of your work! Awesome right?

Dropbox Syncing

So Blackmagic cloud will store our project files, and in our case, today, Jeff and I will keep our footage on local hard drives and use Dropbox to sync a folder of Proxy footage continuously. More on proxies in a second.

So Dropbox is the transfer tool, but we both have copies of footage at our workstations. We're not playing footage through the cloud - that would be crazy. It's just the tiny project files are going live up there. 

If you want to sync a whole post house in the same office, there's a new cloud store, cloud mini, and cloud pod that shares media over 10-gigabit copper ethernet. It's a super-fast NAS; network-attached storage. It's awesome, and hey Blackmagic if you want to send me one to test, I wouldn't say no. But for today, I'm syncing a dropbox folder on my Samsung T7 and uploading across my measly 10meg DSL line over to Jeff.

Blackmagic Proxy Generator

I have a project with 6k Red Raw footage from the Komodo and a couple of 4K DJI Air 2S drone shots, which add up to 80 gigabytes. That's a lot of data to send over the internet, and this is a small project.

So the trick to make this work is to create Proxies, and DaVinci Resolve 18 has a new standalone app called "Blackmagic Proxy Generator." But you might be like, hey, what the heck is a Proxy? 

Well, it's a stand-in. It's like a placeholder, a stunt double. A placeholder that is good enough to see and hear what you need to edit a video, even mix a video, and start setting color looks - but it's a tiny fraction of the file size of the original footage. It's also easy to playback on older computers. If you've ever heard the term dailies or rushes, this is what they're talking about - AND this is how everything you see on TV or the Movies is cut.

So here's how it works. First, you find and open the app. It's in the Applications folder, not inside the DaVinci Resolve application folder.

Drag to add a folder with your high-resolution 4k, 6k, 8k, and 12k footage, and you have a few format options. They're listed based on the lowest to the highest quality, but the compressed h264 and h265 will all be about the same size because they're the same data rate, which is six megabits per second. Also, note ProRes here is actually ProRes Proxy, and I don't think you'll have that option on a windows computer.

Click start and let her run. I've been happy to see that all of my M1 Max Cores get utilized when transcoding the Red Raw footage. And obviously, the DJI drone footage processes much faster than the Komodo footage. Another thing that makes this new proxy generator tool unique and pretty special is that I continue to edit video in resolve 18 while this is running because it's a whole different app. I've found in other NLEs that once you start what they all call a background service, it pauses while you edit, but not with Resolve. Resolve just lets you keep working. 

A bonus tip is using the proxy generator app to set up a render farm. With shared network storage and multiple computers, it's smart enough to watch the files in the folders and alternate which computer processes each clip.

Proxies are cooked, and we went from 80 gigabytes down to 600 megabytes for this project! That's legit. I can upload and push that quickly on my awful internet connection.

The proxies are placed next to our original footage in an obvious folder named proxy. They have the same filenames to match the original big clip filename. That's the magic of offline to online editing. And even after doing this for 20 years, it's still magic to me.

You'll know that you have proxies working behind the scenes in a couple ways. One there is a new badge icon if you look at the clips thumbnail view that has a camera and a film strip and then Two, you should also know about the column view on the media page by right-clicking and checking the box for proxy and proxy media path. This tells you the proxy resolution if it's connected and where it lives.

If it's not connected you can right to connect to any proxy and choose to relink proxy media. Under the playback dropdown menu, choose proxy handling, and then I roll with prefer proxies most of the time. Resolve will export with the camera originals if they're connected, but use the proxies for easier playback. Choose one of the two other options to see the higher resolution footage which can be helpful for pixel-perfect effects and grading.

Now I want to get the small proxy files, not the camera originals, to Jeff with a synced Dropbox folder.

So after you've clicked stop, you can click the extract proxies button to send them to a dropbox synced folder.

Over here in Finder, I have a whole project folder with nested folders to stay organized, which I create using a free app called post haste. So this is what gets synced to Jeff's computer. By default, the installed dropbox app needs the sync preference set to New Files to be available offline. This makes sure you aren't trying to access files living in the clouds. It will always store them locally on a hard drive.

To share the dropbox folder, right-click and go down to share and fill in the email address.

Create the Blackmagic Cloud Project Library

To create a Blackmagic Cloud Project Library, click the cloud button in version 18 and add a project library. This sends you over to their website to log in with your new Blackmagic username. And you'll click to create a project library again down in the lower left.

Pick a server location close to you. I'll choose California and give it a name, just like in Fight Club. 

Click create, and this is your prompt to put in your credit card information. I've already done this. I don't need a second library at the moment. So I'll hit cancel. You'll see that the web interface is the same as the project manager over in DaVinci Resolve.

So in the Resolve project manager, if you don't see a list of project libraries, click this button, and it will expand out. I want to share the creative video tips library with Jeff using his Blackmagic ID. So I'll click the details button and share.

Enter his email address, and he should get an email in his inbox to join the library. This is an important distinction here. I've given access to all my projects in this library, not just a single project inside it.

Collaboration in Action

First, you’ll wan to “enable multiple user collaboration” under the file dropdown menu so all users can work together in the same project at the same time. At this point any user that has had the project shared will be able to open it up and start working.

Relink if necessary. Hey, do you see a purple bar above the footage? That means that you only have the proxies.

The way this works is it's first come, first serve. If you're first to open a timeline, you are the one person with read and write permission on that timeline. The other person can still read it and copy and paste it to their timeline. This is how Resolve prevents version conflicts. 

It's also the same with bins. It's just like the famous bin locking in avid, except that you can't just email a bin. In fact, if you want exclusive "hey don't touch my stuff access", you can right-click to lock a bin.

And then just like how you lock it. You can unlock it. Now just so you know you don't REALLY need to lock bins, clips or timelines, because if you're first into it, you've locked it. And as soon as you click away from it, it's unlocked and someone else can take ownership of that bin, timeline or clip.

The timeline pages all work the same way, where the first person to open a timeline gets complete control. This goes for the cut page, the edit page, and the Fairlight page. You'll know you DON'T have read and write permission because you'll lose access to your tools.

The color and fusion pages work at a clip level. So Jeff, can start color correcting the same timeline as I'm editing it. Multiple colorists can even work on the same timeline at the same time that an editor is trimming on it, because color and fusion are clip based.

We should see a badge showing the shot you're working on.

The color grades will update here at my studio once I stop to accept the changes.

Another thing is that we have a built-in chat window to open in the lower right. The chat will also work on the Mac with your system notifications to help keep you up to date when your remote team member is trying to reach you.

Oh, another thing you can do if you are going to be first into a bin, but don't want the full permission is to option-click, alt on a PC, and you'll open it in read-only mode. You should see an eyeball icon after doing this. To release it, just click it again.  

Because we are using a bi-directional sync with dropbox, I can add a new graphic asset, like this legal disclaimer and it will download and update on Jeff's computer.

Or I can record a scratch voice-over and have that update because if have capture and playback location in project settings set to save clips to the dropbox folder.

And also, there is a Timeline Comparison tool. Just right-click on another timeline and you'll get a fantastic visual of two versions differences. If you want to take the changes from one timeline, maybe an assistant added a graphic. Just right click to accept the change.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful and feel comfortable diving into collaborative video editing with DaVinci Resolve 18.