“The Definitive Guide to PostgreSQL for DaVinci Resolve”

A comprehensive online course demystifying how to set up PostgreSQL properly for DaVinci Resolve

Longtime readers of mine know that I tend to dive into the nitty-gritty technical details of post-production.

It struck me recently that although I have a few open-source scripts that help with automatically backing up and optimizing PostgreSQL databases for DaVinci Resolve, the knowledge about how PostgreSQL is properly deployed for DaVinci Resolve is not really all in one place.

Until now!

I’ve gone ahead and created a brief online course, going through a full setup of a PostgreSQL server for DaVinci Resolve — actually two different setups, on both macOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Though there’s some good knowledge in the DaVinci Resolve manual, it’s somewhat incomplete. There’s also lots of documentation about the PostgreSQL binaries for bash, but they’re geared toward developers and data scientists really using PostgreSQL, running their own queries so as to manipulate their own data.

To my mind, the fact that DaVinci Resolve has a history of running on PostgreSQL stems back to its history from big iron deployments. When Blackmagic Design really acted as Pandora and brought tools that had been $500,000 to the masses for just $1000 and $0, and then later, $300 and $0, they had to overhaul the way the projects were managed: they had to create “disk databases” that were instantly installed along with the rest of the DaVinci Resolve application itself, so users didn’t have to go through with a complicated setup of a PostgreSQL server.

DaVinci Resolve still runs on PostgreSQL, though, for facilities with shared storage that take advantage of collaborative workflows and remote rendering.

As the maintainer of some scripts that help simplify setting up automatic backups and optimizations for PostgreSQL, I’ve unwittingly become somewhat of an authority on the subject, and lots of different individuals have reached out to me over the years, not just for help with the scripts, but to wrap their heads around how to properly set up PostgreSQL correctly at all.

So I figured that I might as well pull together a comprehensive online course.

I’ve put a bunch of work into this course, and I’m really proud of it. My thought in designing it and recording these videos was that I’d go through every facet of properly setting these servers up, as if I were sitting with someone. I explain exactly how you should set up a PostgreSQL server, how you should set up your automatic backups and optimizations, and what it really looks like if your whole server were to fail and you suddenly found yourself needing to rely on those backups.

If you skim through many, many different online post-production forums for colorists and video editors, you’ll see endless confusion around PostgreSQL for DaVinci Resolve. Finally, this is a resource for all these lost and confused souls, like I once was!

Purchase the course over at https://www.sethgoldin.com.