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How to import a poly WAV into DaVinci Resolve
Resolve imports poly WAVs fine. The trouble is that it treats them as one clip until you tell it otherwise.
Drop an eight channel field recording into a Resolve media pool and it arrives as a single audio clip. Nothing is lost, but the boom and the lavs are locked together behind one clip, which is not how a dialogue pass gets done.
Clip attributes is the key panel
Right click the clip in the media pool, choose Clip Attributes, and open the Audio tab. Set the format to Multi Channel and pick the number of tracks. Resolve then exposes each embedded channel as a separate source track that you can drag out individually.
Mono per track, not one 8 channel track
In Clip Attributes, set each track type to Mono rather than leaving one multichannel entry. That is what puts boom, lav 1 and lav 2 on three timeline lanes instead of one fat clip.
Sync by timecode
- Make sure the project frame rate matches the shoot rate before syncing.
- Use Auto Sync Audio based on timecode when the recorder and camera were jammed.
- Fall back to waveform sync for camera scratch that has no matching timecode.
When splitting first is simpler
On documentary jobs with hundreds of takes, splitting the poly files to named mono stems before import is faster than editing clip attributes per clip. The names come from the recorder metadata, so the media pool reads Boom and Lav rather than Track 1 and Track 2.
Keep the rate untouched
Resolve conforms audio to the project rate on playback. Feeding it 48 kHz files from a 48 kHz project avoids any real time conversion and keeps long takes locked to picture.