How to move AVID bins including metadata to DaVinci Resolve

Moving bins and metadata from one application to another can be difficult sometimes. In this tutorial I will explain how to move bins including metadata from AVID Media Composer to DaVinci Resolve. Unfortunately not all metadata can be moved, but the things you can bring from AVID to Resolve are:

Name
Reel Name
Description
Comments
Camera
Camroll
Reel#
LUT
Labroll
VFX Reel
VFX
Soundroll
Sound TC
Production
Scene
Take
Circled take

The AVID bin needs to show the metadata in order for it to get exported as well as the Start and End columns, since these are used by Resolve to recognise the correct clips.

step 1

Export the bin using Tab Delimited

step 2

Next you need to create an empty sequence and add all the clips from the bin to it. (You can just select all and drag it to the timeline in no particular order) This timeline is used in Resolve to import the clips to a Resolve bin.

Export a linked AAF for the sequence

And for the Audio Details tab.

If you need to export several bins you need to do step 1 and 2 for each bin. Unfortunately there is no way to do this in one step.

step 3

Resolve can not read the Tab Delimited files AVID Media Composer creates. You can use Excel or any other spreadsheet software to convert the files to CSV, but then you also need to change the column headers so they are compatible with Resolve.

I have written a small freeware utility which does this all in one step. You can find it here.

Convert the tab limited text files using MetaDataConverter to Resolve compatible CSV files.

step 4

create a bin in Resolve and import the AAF.

Select “Automatically import source clips into media pool”

Now you will have a bin with all the source clips.

step 5

Import the Metadata from the CSV file

And set the correct Import Options and Merge Options.

In this case I don’t have a Reel name in Media Composer, so I need to disable that. But the best way for correct match is if there is a correct Reel name already in Media Composer.