Blackmagic RAW at 6K runs about 800 MB per minute. That's lighter than R3D, heavy enough to matter, and almost always living on a NAS shared between Resolve and Premiere editors who track the same files in completely different ways. That second part is what makes BRAW cleanup quietly dangerous.
A clip that looks unused from the Premiere side might be the heart of a Resolve grading session in a project file nobody thought to check.
Why BRAW Is Its Own Animal
BRAW is closer to a negative than a final print. The .braw file holds the raw sensor data, but the look (the LUT, the gain, the color science version, the in/out trim) lives somewhere else. That somewhere else changes depending on whether you're in Resolve or Premiere, and that's where cleanup workflows go sideways.
Think of it this way. The .braw is the negative. The metadata is the colorist's notebook. Throwing away one without the other gives you either a heavy file with no instructions, or instructions for a file that doesn't exist anymore. Neither is useful, and the second one is how you end up explaining a media-offline error to a director in the middle of a review.
Sidecars, LUTs, and the Files That Travel Together
A typical BRAW capture from a URSA or Pocket 6K leaves you with:
- The
.brawfile itself (one per clip, no spanning, that's a small mercy) - A
.braw.sidecarfile when anyone has touched the metadata in Blackmagic RAW Player or Resolve - Optional camera LUTs in the same folder, often referenced by the sidecar
- Sometimes a
.ditor audio scratch file from on-set workflows
The sidecar is small but carries every override the colorist has applied. ISO, white balance, gamut, tint, exposure. Delete the .braw and the sidecar is dead weight. Delete the sidecar and the next person to open the clip sees the camera-default look, not the look the DP and colorist agreed on at dailies. Any cleanup pass that doesn't move the family together is a cleanup pass that destroys color work.
How Resolve and Premiere Track BRAW Differently
This is the part that gets editors burned.
Resolve treats BRAW as a first-class citizen. A Resolve project database stores direct references to each .braw file, plus a copy of (or link to) the sidecar's decisions baked into the project's color page. If you delete a .braw that's referenced by a Resolve timeline, you'll see it the next time someone opens the project. But if nobody opens that project for six months, you won't know anything broke until they do.
Premiere references BRAW through its standard MasterClip and SubClip system. The reference points at the file on disk. Premiere doesn't know or care about the sidecar. It'll happily decode the .braw with default settings if the sidecar disappears. Which means a Premiere editor can technically "use" a BRAW clip while silently throwing away the colorist's intent.
The dangerous combination is a NAS where Resolve and Premiere editors share the same media folder. The Premiere editor runs cleanup based on Premiere usage. Their tool says "this clip isn't on any Premiere timeline, safe to delete." Meanwhile it's the hero shot in a Resolve grading session for a separate deliverable nobody mentioned.
What Actually Works
Cleanup on a shared BRAW drive needs three things:
- Walk every project file on the drive, not just the ones from your NLE. That means every
.prprojand every Resolve project database. A clip is in use if any project on the drive references it. - Treat the
.brawand its sidecar as a unit. Either both stay or both go. Never split the family. - Verify before deleting. Generate the reclaim list, spot-check a few clips against the timelines they're supposedly absent from, and only then commit.
Skip step one and you'll quietly destroy other people's grades. Skip step two and you'll keep storage but lose color. Skip step three and you'll learn the hard way that one of your "unused" clips was actually the opening shot.
Reclaim Math
At ~800 MB/min for BRAW 6K, the numbers add up faster than people expect:
- 100 unused minutes = 80 GB
- 500 unused minutes = 400 GB
- 2,000 unused minutes (one busy commercial year) = 1.6 TB
BRAW doesn't hit you as hard per-minute as RED, but it's the format most likely to be sitting on a shared NAS that's billed monthly. Run the numbers through the calculator and look at what 1.6 TB costs you in cloud or NAS amortization over a year. It's usually the price of a small camera lens, paid every twelve months, for footage nobody is touching.
Before You Expand the Array
Clip Sweeper walks the reference chains across every project on a drive and treats BRAW sidecars as part of the file they describe, so cleanup doesn't accidentally orphan a colorist's work. Worth a look before you expand the array again.