OWC’s Rocket Yard on Online Vs. Offline Editing: Why You Still Need To Consider Proxy Videos

Conner Stirling at Rocket Yard on Online Vs. Offline Editing: Why You Still need to Consider Proxy Videos.

Most things I work on professionally are 4K for a 1080 delivery, so you really don’t need Proxy with a fast enough RAID and mechanical hard drives, but my experience with 6K DaVinci Resolve RAW footage I have realized that a proxy workflow may be back in my future.

The problem is that for VFX work I need to work with RAW and my iMac Pro with only 64 GB of RAM is really starting to show it’s age.

Does anyone else find that Media Encoder always freezes on a large project ingest in Premiere Pro?

I am setting up a project for a short film that my wife, wrote, shot and directed (I gaffed, key gripped and ACed) and decided to try ingest once again. Now I have already converted the iPhone footage to ProRES to get it 23.976 instead of variable frame rate, but since she is using it on an old computer decided to use the Proxy workflow and thought, why not try Ingest again.

I knew I shouldn’t but I thought I would try. Now I went for the ProRES Proxy LT codec, as I refuse to have any H.264 in my Porject, but of course halfway through compression Media Encoder locked up and I had to force quit. This of course messes up the whole INGEST thing and I ended up with some shots linked to the proxies and some linked to the original media and some without proxies at all.

You can easily re-attach proxies and re-attach full resolution media as well here.

Of course if the file names are the same, it is pretty easy to link between the files, but of course it didn’t do files in file name order, so I had to figure out which files had a proxy, and then start the proxy creation again.

In my whole career I don’t think I have every had Ingest work all the way without a crash. Now I should have tried the new Beta and the Ingest settings, but since my wife is editing on an old version of Premiere I decided against it.

And the fact that Media Encoder balks at any shot over 60 FPS, which they claim is the limit of Professional footage, it just won’t work. So any slow mo you will be using full resolution.