Final Cut Pro X Proxy Mode Explained

do you have trouble editing 4k or ak footage on your older mac well this video is all about proxy mode in the new final cut pro 10.4.9 let's get into it [Music] real quick if you're new here i'm chadwick this is creative video tips where i help you create videos and make a difference and stand out subscribe right now if that's something you're into so you don't miss next week's tip okay proxy mode what is it well the too long didn't read version of proxy mode is it's a way to make your large 4k or ak files smaller both in resolution and file size and then it also is a way to make them playback smoother so this right here is a 2015 imac and i can play back anything you give me give me some you know komodo dragon you know whatever it is 8k canon r5 the 12k blackmagic that's going to come out i know i can edit it because i can make the proxy files now this new version of final cut pro 10 has three awesome things that they've added for proxy mode the first thing is you have options now so you can either create your proxies in prores proxy which was the option before and then you also have h.264 and h.264 as you know you're usually shooting in h.264 you also deliver an h264 and if you asked me a year ago i would have never said hey maybe it's a good idea to edit in h.264 but i've been trying it out for the past month and it's actually really good with the sony a7iii that i'm shooting on right now and 4k 24p or whatever uh you know let's say we have a 100 megabyte file if you make a proxy of that using h.264 you know at 1080p it makes it eight megabytes we're talking going from 100 megabytes to eight megabytes that's eight percent of the size that means you can fit a a lot of media into a fairly small small file size and that makes it portable so if you have another editor somewhere you can send it off to them no problem uploading it to a service like frame io or dropbox or google drive you know whatever you like to use real quick let's jump in and i'll show you how to make the proxy files here's one of the ways you can go about making a proxy file within final cut pro so select the clip that you want to transcode and then right click on it and you say transcode media and then you've got optimized media which is a full res prores file which is not what we want to do we want to do create proxy media and then you have your options here pros proxy and h.264 so i'm going to choose h.264 and this original clip is 4k so if i do it at 50 that's actually making a 1080p file for me which is perfect you can also choose this 1920x1080 and it'll give you the same result so anyways i'll choose 50 click ok and we can see up here in this little inspector window that it's starting to go to town on it okay awesome that clip is done transcoding and we can take a look and see what the file size is by saying reveal proxy in media finder and right here this is inside my library is where i have it set to go it says clip 9 or 38.3 megabytes and then we can also take a look at what the original file was so if we say reveal in finder this one's 490 megabytes for that 4k file so we're looking at a difference of 490 megabytes and then this proxy one is 38 megabytes so there you go eight percent of the file size the bigger reason for me is not even so much that file size it's the fact that um i can use an older computer right so it cuts like a hot knife through butter and uh i love that and you know like my day job i have a beefier machine it's a it's one of those brand new mac pros i'm still making proxies because it just makes the whole experience that much better i can be more creative i don't have to wait for dropped frames or you know stuttering skimmer and that sort of thing that maybe is going to happen with the 4k original media i like to edit fast and i know you're going to want to edit fast so you're going to want to make proxies one other way to make that proxy media is when you're importing a clip you could say file import media and then just right off the bat you could you could click on a clip and say over here on the right there's a transcode create proxy media option so if you knew right off the bat you wanted to make proxy files you could do that there as well all right another thing that is super sweet is they have a proxy preferred drop down menu now this is new and what that means is you can have a timeline with your playback set so that you're looking at proxy files if you have them and if you just have original media in there it'll play that too that you couldn't do that before it was either all proxy or all original media you know what i would suggest is you bring all your stuff in you transcode it and make proxies of it and then if you get a pickup shot or maybe it's a vfx shot you don't have to hurry to transcode that to show someone what you're working on you can just drop that in and you'll still see it and be able to work with it right away and then if you go get coffee later or whatever you can say yeah let's go and ahead and transcode that file so it's super smooth if you keep working on it for the same project for several weeks and whatnot next i want to show you the difference in the performance on my computer here with looking at original or optimized media playback so by clicking that you can see the timeline just flashed so i can click and play that and you know like my day job i have a beefier machine so you can see that sort of stuttered there it's also it just takes longer to update and then if i go down here to proxy preferred which is this brand new option so proxy preferred it just switched all the clips that it knows there's a proxy 2 in the timeline 2 proxy which is all of these clips here and now things just really really zip here on my skimmer and when if i try to play back something it plays back like instantly large 4k or ak files smaller both in resolution and file size and it does that without dropping any frames so that's awesome now the thing you have to watch for with that proxy preferred drop down is when you go to export you're going to want to make sure you switch back to the original or optimize media for that because the export process whatever it's called is going to it's going to look at what that setting is so you don't want to be exporting a final mastered version or even a review copy that's looking at compressing your compressed proxies you wanted to look at the original media so that's just a word of warning and it's it's built into there so if you try doing it it's going to say hey are you sure you want to do this and you just click oops you know we go back and change it to original so that's awesome [Music] another thing that's really cool about the new version of final cut is you can actually link to the proxy files made on another system so this file number eight here doesn't have proxy media so if i went down here to file re-link files there is now an option to say re-link proxy media so maybe it's on set you have a dit that's making dailies and davinci resolve oh that's that's another word for proxy files if you have heard the word dailies that's what a proxy file is it's just like the industry term and if you're from england i think it's called rushes so i used to work with an editor and he always called them rushes and would say good mate and uh you know all those it was an interesting relationship anyways uh getting back to it uh you got dailies you got rushes and then you know offline editing is is another term that gets thrown around a lot and offline editing just means you're working with these low res versions of the the original media it's much more friendly to create a story with and it's much more portable and manageable so you can create them in another app and then you just link to them here in final cut my preference personally is you know i just like to import the original media straight into final cut as a as a leave in place option and then i create the proxy files and have the proxy files live in the library and then as soon as i'm done editing and i've got my final video exported it's all beautiful and everyone's happy and you know the world is rejoicing at that point i will go ahead and say delete generated files and will blow away and delete those proxy files because you know we're done with the project and we don't need to take up any extra space even though it isn't all that much space so now you are a proxy master you have no excuse for not using that old computer that could be making amazing videos because guess what you've got what it takes and final cut pro can help you get there if you found this video useful at all hit the like button subscribe if you're new this kind of content and if you have any questions please leave a comment i want to make sure i'm as clear as possible and i want to make sure that i'm helping as many people as possible i appreciate you watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Creative Video Tips

Views: 24,812

Keywords: fcpx proxy media workflow, fcpx proxy media vs optimized media, fcpx proxy media, fcpx proxy workflow, fcpx tutorial 2020, fcpx tutorial beginner, fcpx tips and tricks, fcpx trips, final cut pro x, final cut pro proxy media, creative video tips, video editing tips, how to edit video, how to edit 4k in final cut pro x, how to edit 4k video, how to edit 4k video without lag, video editing tricks, faster video editing tip, final cut pro x tutorial

Id: p7JfXLRoHAU

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020