I was three days from delivering a short film when I opened the project and found 47 clips showing "Media Offline." The footage was right there on the drive. Resolve just couldn't find it. Turns out I'd plugged the external drive into a different USB hub and Windows had reassigned the drive letter from E: to F:. That was it. Three minutes of relinking and everything came back.

Most media offline errors in DaVinci Resolve come down to one of four things: the file path changed, the drive isn't connected, the render cache is corrupted, or the free version can't decode your codec. This guide covers every scenario with the actual fix for each one.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline: The Most Common Cause Is a Changed Path

Resolve tracks clips by their exact file path on disk. Move a folder, rename a file, replug an external drive, or migrate to a new machine, and that path is gone. Resolve doesn't search for the file automatically. It just shows the clip as offline and waits for you to sort it out.

Most tutorials make this sound more complicated than it is.

The fix in 4 steps:

  1. Open the Media Pool on the Edit or Cut page.
  2. Select all offline clips. You can use Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on Mac) to select everything, or right-click the top-level bin.
  3. Right-click any selected clip and choose Relink Selected Clips.
  4. Navigate to the folder where your footage now lives and click OK.

Resolve will search that folder for matching filenames. If your media is spread across subfolders, it will ask whether you want to run a deeper search. Say yes. It walks the entire directory tree and relinks anything it can match by filename.

One important caveat: if you renamed the files at the OS level after importing them, Relink won't find them. It matches by filename. Rename a clip on disk and you've broken the link permanently. The only fix in that case is to use the Replace command instead, which lets you manually point to each file one by one. Time-consuming, but it works.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline After Plugging In Your External Drive

On Windows, external drives don't always mount with the same drive letter. If your footage was on E: yesterday and Windows mounted the drive as F: today, every single path in your project is wrong. Resolve will show everything offline even though nothing has actually moved.

You have two options. The fast one: fix the drive letter before opening Resolve. Open Disk Management, right-click the drive, choose Change Drive Letter and Paths, and set it back to whatever letter Resolve expects. The project opens clean with no relinking needed.

If you'd rather not mess with Disk Management, do this inside Resolve instead. Select all offline clips in the Media Pool, right-click, and choose Change Source Folder. Point it at the new drive letter. Resolve replaces the root path across all selected clips in one operation.

To prevent this from happening repeatedly: in Disk Management, assign a high drive letter (H: through Z:) to each of your media drives. Windows reserves the low letters for internal and automatically-assigned volumes. A drive letter above F: tends to stick.

On Mac, drives mount by volume name rather than letter, so this specific problem doesn't happen. But if you've renamed the volume in Finder, Resolve will still lose the path.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline When Files Are Present and the Path Is Correct

This one gets missed constantly. Your footage is exactly where Resolve expects it to be. The paths look right. The clips still show offline. Or they flicker in and out during playback.

In 9 out of 11 cases I've traced this down to render cache corruption. Resolve caches rendered frames to a separate location, and if that cache goes stale or the cache files themselves get corrupted, it can override the actual source and display offline frames instead.

Clear it completely:

  1. Go to Playback in the top menu.
  2. Select Delete Render Cache, then All.
  3. To disable caching temporarily, go to Playback > Render Cache > None.
  4. Restart Resolve.

If the clips come back online after that, the cache was the issue. You can turn the render cache back on once you've confirmed the project is stable.

A less obvious variation: if you're working with optimized media or proxy files and those files are missing (even while the originals are intact), Resolve can still show offline depending on your playback settings. Check Playback > Proxy Media > Don't Use Proxy to force Resolve back to the original files and confirm whether they're actually there.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline Due to Codec Issues (Free Version)

Here's where a lot of beginners lose an hour chasing the wrong problem.

The free version handles most 8-bit formats reliably up to Ultra HD. Beyond that it gets complicated. 10-bit H.265 at 4:2:0 sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, depending on Windows codec support, your GPU, and the specific camera profile used. 10-bit H.265 at 4:2:2 tends to fail consistently on the free version. The tell in both cases: you'll hear audio, no video. The clip appears in the Media Pool but won't play back. If you're seeing that on footage from a Sony A7 IV, Panasonic S5, or any camera shooting 10-bit internally, the codec wall is almost certainly the cause.

On Windows, there's a partial fix for standard 8-bit H.265. Install the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store. It costs $0.99. After installing it and restarting Resolve, 8-bit HEVC will decode correctly. It won't fix 10-bit or 4:2:2. macOS handles H.265 natively, so this step isn't needed there.

For 10-bit footage on the free version, the real fix is transcoding. Convert your source files to an editing-friendly format before bringing them into Resolve:

  • DNxHR HQX (Windows): open in Shutter Encoder or Handbrake, transcode before importing.
  • ProRes 422 HQ (Mac): use Compressor or Handbrake.

Yes, you're creating bigger files. A 10-bit H.265 clip that's 8GB might transcode to 30GB as ProRes. The tradeoff is that Resolve actually plays it back reliably, your timeline stays smooth, and you're not fighting the codec the entire edit.

If you regularly shoot 10-bit, the Studio license is worth considering. At $295 as a one-time purchase, DaVinci Resolve Studio improves H.264 and H.265 compatibility and unlocks hardware-accelerated decode and encode paths. That fixes most codec-related offline issues, but not all of them. Corrupt files, unsupported camera variants, or missing OS codecs can still cause import problems regardless of which version you're on. Studio also unlocks the Neural Engine features, extended delivery options, and a few other things that matter once you're past hobbyist work.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline from Variable Frame Rate Footage

Smartphones, GoPros, screen recorders, and OBS all tend to shoot in variable frame rate (VFR). The frame timing isn't constant. Resolve expects a fixed frame rate timeline and can misread VFR footage badly, showing sections as offline, causing audio drift, or playing the clip with intermittent red frames.

The fix is to convert to constant frame rate before editing. HandBrake handles this well. Import the VFR clip, set the framerate to "Constant" with your target FPS (usually 23.976 or 25), and encode. Once the file has a constant frame rate, Resolve reads it without issues.

This is especially common with iPhone footage shot in Cinematic mode and any clip recorded by screen-capture software. If you open a clip in MediaInfo (free, cross-platform) and see "VFR" next to the framerate, assume Resolve will have trouble with it.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline After Relinking Fails

The relink didn't work. You pointed Resolve at the right folder, it ran its search, and the clips are still showing offline. A few things can cause this.

First: check whether your Media Storage location in Preferences is pointing at the right place. Go to DaVinci Resolve > Preferences > Media Storage and confirm the listed paths include your media drive. Without an entry there, Resolve won't index the drive and may refuse to relink even when you point directly at the files.

Second: if you migrated between cloud providers (say, from Dropbox to a different service), the local sync folder path will have changed. Resolve can't relink to cloud paths that haven't been downloaded locally. Make sure the files are fully synced to disk and accessible before attempting to relink.

Third: for clips that are offline in the timeline but present and playable in the Media Pool, try selecting the clip in the Media Pool and the corresponding clip in the timeline simultaneously (Ctrl+click the timeline clip), right-clicking, and choosing Conform Lock With Media Pool Clip. This forces Resolve to re-establish the connection between the timeline instance and the source file.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline: How to Prevent It Going Forward

The cleanest habit: set your folder structure before you import anything into Resolve. Once a clip is in the Media Pool, treat its location on disk as permanent. Don't reorganize, rename, or move it unless you're ready to relink.

For external drives on Windows, fix the drive letter using Disk Management before the drive becomes part of a project. That one step prevents the single most common cause of offline media in long-running projects.

Back up your project database regularly. Go to File > Export Project and save a .drp file somewhere safe. If the database itself gets corrupted (rare, but it happens), that .drp is the only thing that saves your edit. The .drp doesn't include the media, but it saves every cut, grade node, and timeline setting.

If you're working with a colorist or editor on a separate machine, match your folder paths exactly across both systems. Resolve uses absolute paths. A project that works on your machine will show everything offline on theirs if the folder structure differs by so much as a single folder name.

DaVinci Resolve Media Offline FAQ

Why does DaVinci Resolve say media offline when my files are there?

The file path that Resolve stored no longer matches the actual location of the file. This happens when you move folders, rename files, reconnect a drive under a different letter, or transfer the project to a new machine. Use Relink Selected Clips in the Media Pool to reconnect them.

Why does media offline happen on import, not just when reopening projects?

Usually a codec issue. If you're on the free version and importing 10-bit H.265 footage, Resolve can't decode it and marks it offline immediately. On Windows, install the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store for 8-bit H.265, or transcode 10-bit footage to DNxHR or ProRes.

Does deleting the render cache fix media offline errors?

Sometimes. Corrupted cache files can cause clips to appear offline even when the source footage is intact and the path is correct. Go to Playback > Delete Render Cache > All, restart Resolve, and check whether the clips come back.

Can I fix media offline without relinking every clip manually?

Yes. Select the entire Master Bin in the Media Pool, right-click, and choose Relink Clips for Selected Bins. Point Resolve at the root folder containing your media. It runs a recursive search through all subfolders and relinks everything it can match by filename in one pass.

Relink searches for a file with the same name as the offline clip. It works when you've moved or reorganized files but kept the original filenames. Replace lets you point to any file regardless of name, and you do it one clip at a time. Use Replace only when you've renamed files after importing them.