The Movie Minute with Madeline, Episode #5
Hey everyone,
Madeline here, back at it again with another entry in The Movie Minute, this time focusing on an essential part of the editing process: proxies!
So what exactly is a proxy? First, some background: When editing projects, we first have to import the raw footage from the camera, which often consists of video files with quite large bitrates and sizes. While Premiere Pro and other non-linear editing software (i.e. Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve) can work with these files on their own, it can often be impractical, as the large bitrates and encoding of the raw footage take up a significant amount of the computer’s memory and other resources, and regular video players often have trouble playing raw footage for this same reason!
That’s where proxies come in: they are low-res versions of the footage that the NLE references and displays when working with the footage to relieve the strain on the editor’s hardware, while the final export will continue to use the raw footage before encoding/compressing to the desired format. The proxies themselves and how they are made can vary by format and software, but for us, the best and most efficient way to ingest proxies is to have Media Encoder generate them overnight, after creating the proxy jobs in Premiere. For example, we typically use H.264 format (same format used for exporting final video for the web), and quarter size/low quality to save on space and bitrates, while also enabling watermarks if possible to help differentiate. However, the best format for your project can depend on multiple factors, as for example, the H.264 format proxies cannot be used for Sony FS7 footage due to the large amount of audio channels, so for that kind of footage we have to use CineForm instead. They have certainly made the process easier for us and saved a lot of time!
Here’s what my fellow team members at Poor Bear have to say about proxies:
“I remember when I first started in video production and was editing on my quad core processor laptop, I literally couldn’t edit without proxies. Now, [even on 12 and 24 core processors] we use them for data-heavy projects. When working with hours of footage, proxies are pretty much mandatory. Even the most powerful computers can’t process the amount of data required to edit hours and hours of raw footage. I also appreciate how smooth “scrubbing” through proxy footage is opposed to raw. Like butta!”
-Jacob Centeno, Founder and Creative Director
“My editing system is pretty formidable, but I still work with proxies. The procedure I mostly go with is having the raw footage on several multi-terabyte hard drive disks. These hold a lot of data without wiping out your wallet. I currently have two, and am looking at getting a third. All my proxies, however, live on a super fast (and very expensive) SSD. With several times the read speed, but with much smaller files, I almost get no lag when viewing footage. Now this isn’t perfect; color grading against proxies is not a good idea, but it makes the rest of the project way smoother.”
-Robert Chase, Senior Editor
“It takes too much time to render proxies ( I do not like to waste time), and my PC can handle beefy codecs such as H.264, but as new codecs like H.265 becomes more the industry standard (I will need to do proxies or spec up my PC).”
- Jhoel Flores, Producer
As Jhoel and Chase pointed out, using proxies may not be practical or necessary for all situations (I admit, I have been able to edit without proxies at times, and I usually don’t do proxies yet until I have synced the full interviews). In addition, when color grading or extracting stills to use as thumbnails, it’s important to turn proxies off (using a toggle button) to ensure a high quality image file. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to create and ingest proxies if time allows, as it can be quite beneficial for the editor.
To sum it all up, proxies are a useful tool that can immensely speed up the editing process and make things run more smoothly and efficiently. They can even be necessary for the editing process to be able to start at all, depending on the editor’s hardware. As even the most powerful editing computers can face challenges when dealing with raw footage containing high bitrates, proxies have been a real game changer when
That’s all for this week’s entry in The Movie Minute. Stay tuned for more explorations of the world of filmmaking, and I will see you all next week! -Madeline