You organized your footage carefully at ingest — by date, by camera, by scene. Then you drag the whole folder into DaVinci Resolve's Media Pool and every clip lands in one flat bin, subfolders gone, as if the organization never existed. It didn't disappear — it just got dropped in the wrong spot.
The rule: drop the folder onto the bin list on the left side of the Media page, not into the clip grid on the right. The grid only ever imports files; the bin list mirrors your Finder folders as nested bins.
Step by step
- Open the Media page in DaVinci Resolve and make sure the bin panel (the tree of bins on the left, usually showing "Master Bin") is visible.
- In Finder — or in Resolve's own Media Storage browser — locate the parent folder that contains your subfolders (for example, a folder organized by camera or by date).
- Drag that parent folder directly onto the bin list, not onto the media pool grid in the middle or right of the window.
- Resolve creates a new bin matching the parent folder's name, with a nested bin for each subfolder inside it — exactly mirroring the structure on disk.
- Open any of the nested bins and the clips from that specific subfolder are already sitting there, ready to edit.
Why the grid area behaves differently
The clip grid in the middle of the Media Pool is built to show media, not folders — it walks into every subfolder and pulls the files out, discarding the hierarchy along the way. That's useful when you genuinely want everything in one bin, but it's the wrong target the moment your organization is part of what you're trying to preserve.
Why the folder structure at ingest matters here
This trick only pays off if the folder you're dragging in was organized well in the first place. A project folder split by date and camera at the moment of ingest turns into a clean, already-sorted bin tree with one drag; a flat dump of four thousand identically named files turns into a flat, unsorted bin no matter where you drop it.