A DaVinci Resolve project server is a PostgreSQL database you host yourself, which Resolve Studio connects to instead of using its local project library. It gives you the same multi-editor collaboration as Blackmagic Cloud's $5/month project library, for $0/month — and it makes you the person responsible when the database goes down.
That trade is the whole decision, and for most distributed teams the $5 wins.
What it actually is
Resolve stores projects in a database. By default that database is local to your machine. Point Resolve Studio at a shared PostgreSQL instance instead and every editor connected to it sees the same projects, bins and timelines, with Resolve's collaboration features working exactly as they do on the cloud version.
Three things follow from that, and they surprise people:
- The server holds projects, not media. Footage stays wherever it already is. Every editor
still needs their own path to the media, and those paths need to match.
- Resolve Studio is required. The free version does not do collaboration.
- It is a real database. It needs backups, and it needs someone who knows how to restore one.
When it wins
Everyone is on one network. If your editors and your media are in the same building, a project server on that network is faster than anything routed through the internet, and free.
You already run a NAS or a server. The marginal cost of one more Postgres instance on hardware that is already on is close to zero.
The project count is large and long-lived. A facility with hundreds of archived projects gets more from owning the database than from renting it.
When it loses
Distributed teams. Remote editors need a VPN to reach it, and now you are maintaining a VPN. Blackmagic's $5/month cloud project library exists precisely to remove this problem, and at $5 it is very hard to justify building it yourself.
No one owns the backups. A project server that nobody backs up is a single point of failure for every project in the building. This is the failure mode, and it does not announce itself until the day it matters.
Nobody on staff is comfortable with Postgres. Not a reason to avoid it forever, but a real reason not to adopt it the week before a deadline.
The honest comparison
| Self-hosted server | Cloud Project Library | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | $5 |
| Remote access | needs a VPN | built in |
| Backups | yours | Blackmagic's |
| Setup | Postgres install + config | sign in |
| Media included | no | no (that is $15/TB extra) |
Blackmagic Cloud pricing verified 2026-08-09.
Note the last row: neither option moves your media. Both give you a shared project database and nothing else. If your problem is "my editors cannot reach the footage," a project server does not solve it, and neither does the $5 cloud library.
The thing that breaks collaboration either way
Shared projects only work when every editor resolves the same media paths. The most common cause of a broken shared project is not the database — it is media that moved, got duplicated into a second location, or was cleaned up on one machine but not another.
That is worth auditing before you set up any kind of collaboration, cloud or self-hosted. Clip Sweeper shows what every project on a drive actually references, including the files that two projects share — which are exactly the ones you must not delete when you tidy up.