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Resolve & Colour line · stop 13 of 14 · 18 min · members

Relinking media without panic, and moving a project so it does not break

Moving a project between drives and machines, and recovering the one time it goes wrong.

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01

Why it breaks

A project stores paths, not files.

Move anything and the references point at a location that no longer exists.

An editing project does not contain your footage. It contains a list of file locations plus everything you did with them. Move the footage, rename a folder, plug the drive into a different machine, and the list is wrong.

The application then asks you to relink, and how painful that is depends entirely on decisions made before the move — principally whether the structure is consistent.

Relinking a folder where everything sits in one predictable tree is a single operation. Relinking material scattered across three drives with inconsistent names is a long afternoon.

02

The prevention

One project folder, everything inside it, relative to itself.

The structure that survives transfer.

ProjectName/
  01_footage/
  02_audio/
  03_proxies/
  04_graphics/
  05_exports/
  project.drp

Everything the project references lives inside one top-level folder. Nothing is referenced from a desktop, a downloads folder or a second drive.

Then moving the project is moving one folder, and relinking is pointing at its new location once. The internal structure is unchanged, so the application matches everything below it automatically.

The common failure is one graphic left on the desktop. It works for months and breaks the moment the project travels.

03

When it does break

Relink at the highest level, not per file.

Point at the folder above the material and let it search.

Select all offline media, choose relink, and point at the top-level project folder rather than at the specific directory. The application searches down through the tree and matches by name.

Because names are unchanged, everything reconnects. Doing this per file, or per bin, multiplies a single operation by the number of clips.

If a subset stays offline, the cause is almost always a rename or a duplicate name in two folders. Both are findable by comparing the offline list against the file system, and both are prevented by naming at ingest.

04

Proxies

Keep them inside the structure and matched by name.

Proxy relinking fails for the same reasons, in a way that is harder to notice.

Proxies should sit in their own folder inside the project, with filenames matching their sources exactly apart from the extension. That is what lets the application pair them automatically.

Where they were generated elsewhere with a suffix appended, the pairing breaks and you either work at full resolution without realising or spend an hour relinking manually.

Check after any move that you are actually on proxies — a timeline that has silently fallen back to full resolution is slow in a way people blame on the machine.

05

Handing over

Export a self-contained copy, not a project file.

Sending only the project sends only the list.

When another person or machine needs the project, use the application's function for collecting media into a single folder alongside the project. It copies everything referenced into one place, which is exactly the structure that will relink cleanly on arrival.

Check the size before sending. This collects everything referenced, including material you stopped using, and projects are frequently much larger than expected.

Include a short note with the frame rate, the colour space and anything unusual. It takes a minute and prevents the first question you will otherwise be asked.

06

The habit

Structure at the start, not when it breaks.

Everything here is free if done at ingest and expensive afterwards.

Every technique above depends on decisions made before any editing happened: one folder, consistent names, everything inside, proxies matched.

None of it can be applied retroactively without rebuilding the project, which is why relinking has a reputation for being painful. The pain is in projects that were never structured, and it is entirely avoidable.

Make the folder structure a template. Copying an empty tree at the start of every job costs seconds and removes this category of problem permanently.