How to Edit 4K+ on a SLOW Computer - DaVinci Resolve 18.5 Proxy Workflow!

so you have some fancy 4K footage and you bring it into resolve and it just has a hard time because your computer maybe isn't very good here's a way to edit 4K footage even on a slow computer here I am in DaVinci Resolve just in the edit page and I have some 4K footage here and it plays back all right on my system it's good but that's not always the case you can see if I skip around here it takes a little bit to kind of play back it's not terrible but it's certainly not having an easy time with it so let's make this a little bit nicer on ourselves there are a few different ways to deal with this but I really think the easiest and best way to get this footage editable which is totally a word is with proxies now if you've ever used proxies before on any other program you know it's kind of miserable but it's actually really amazing in resolve first thing we're going to do is go up to our DaVinci Resolve menu here and go to preferences and under system under media storage we're going to go down here and I like to set proxy generation location to proxy subfold builders in media file locations what the heck does that mean what this means is that when we make proxies it's going to put them right by the full res files which is generally where you want your media anyway right you want your media next to the high-res media so that you can play it back and you have everything all in one place you can also have it use the project setting or ask when creating I pretty much just have it on this first one okay make sure that that is set so I'll hit save and then I'm going to go down to the lower right hand corner to the settings Cog right here these are our project settings and here under master settings we'll scroll part of the way down here and we have this section optimized media and render cache this is where we choose all of the options for how we render things and cache files and that kind of thing one thing by the way take this render cache format do yourself a favor and make this like dnxhr SQ or something like that okay don't leave it on uncompressed that's going to murder your computer okay same thing with optimized media might as well okay we're just going to do something like that we're not really going to use optimized media but just in case something from happens you know what I'm saying what we really want to pay attention to is this proxy media resolution and proxy media format we got to make sure that these are the right settings for most systems nowadays you can leave this on h.264 but there are also some other options if you want to choose them if you're having a hard time playing back h.264 maybe you try dnxhr lb that's a low quality dnxhr that's pretty easy to play back but again a lot of systems these days will play back h.264 just fine this wasn't always the case so if you talk to some old school people they might be like what are you doing man what are you what is this just tell them hey it's okay it's all right proxy media resolution this is going to be pretty helpful if you have some high res footage like 4K footage and you have a really slow computer you might consider setting this to half quarter or even an eighth of the resolution let's just switch this to 1 8 and then just hit save now we're set up to make proxies so we have our footage here in our media pool we've already imported into resolve and all we have to do is just select whatever clips that we're having a hard time playing back right click and go down to generate proxy media what this is going to do is make a low resolution copy of each of these files and it's going to put it in a folder called proxies in the same location where our full res media is and if you have a lot of footage or if the clips are really long it's going to take a while so this one just for these couple Clips which is I think 20 minutes or so is going to take nine minutes or so for it to think about if you're having a hard time playing stuff back this is really really worth doing I generally make proxies for everything I'm working with even though I have a pretty good system just because it's so much easier to edit things when they just play back nicely you don't have to wait for it to kind of spin up and do that kind of thing but while this is going let me show you something else really cool about proxies if you have resolve installed you'll also have a utility called Blackmagic proxy generator so I can open this up and this is a little utility that is separate from resolve and what it will do is it will automatically make proxies for you if it's running and you put media into a folder that it's watching so what you do is you go down here to add and you select whatever folder you're going to dump your camera Cards into or wherever your hi-res media is you select that folder and hit select folder and that will add that to this watch folders list and it'll ask what kind of proxies you want to make most of the time I just do h.264 8bit 420 half res 1080P and this is basically the same idea except for you don't have to have resolve open and tied up making your proxy media this can run in the background and what it will do is it'll do the same thing it'll make a proxy file in the same location as your hi-res media inside of a folder called proxies so for instance here's some hi-res media that we shot in Blackmagic raw at 6K and it just adds this folder called proxy and it adds the proxies in there and they're named the same thing and it will do that as you dump footage into that folder or you can just select a folder and have it kind of batch convert all of that stuff but either way once we have proxies generated resolve will recognize that there are proxies that belong to each of these files and that's indicated by this little icon that has the camera behind the film strip that means that there are proxies and by default if we go up to playback here and look at proxy handling it's set to prefer proxies now what that means is that as we play this back look how well this plays back now oh it's just crazy it's so good ah look at that butter so now even on a pretty slow system all it's really doing is thinking about how to play back this proxy which is a lower quality version that's easier to play back that kind of replaces this version here in the timeline now you might be saying well why shoot in 4k then if I'm just going to convert it well the idea here is that you're only replacing this while you edit and so you can adjust this edit for time and content and make it just the way that you want in this really nice easy to play back format oh it just works so well even on just an awful laptop this will work and then when it's time to do something fancy like if you want to see the high resolution you know in your color so if I hit Ctrl F obviously this looks terrible right this is all pixely and it sucks but at any point if I want to look at the full res version I can go up to playback and under proxy handling we can just switch to prefer camera originals and that'll switch that out and if you're just looking at a still frame and not trying to play this back in real time you can see the final quality of this right in fact don't tell anybody but you can do some color grading on this and no it won't act exactly like the originals but you can get a pretty good idea and quickly go through and kind of rough in your colors even with the low res clips and they're going to look pretty similar to what you're going to get even with the high resolution and then again you can always just switch back over to the camera Originals to make sure everything's working well and there isn't some weird problem and so it's always connected to the camera Originals to the high res media but just for convenience sake you can switch to Preferred proxies and work a little faster when you deliver this when you export this when you render it for your actual output and you go to the deliver page you don't even need to remember to switch these proxies back it will automatically switch them when it renders unless you tell it not to if you go all the way down to the very bottom of our render settings here go to advanced settings you can tell this to use your proxies so if you're doing just a really quick render and you just want to see kind of the story and you don't care if it looks good you can click use proxy media and that's okay but by default it'll switch it out with the hi-res footage even though I'm looking at the proxies here so this whole process is so painless after you render the proxies that again I mean this is just this is kind of just what we do now is we make proxies automatically because they don't take up much space they're really easy to play back resolve switches these out brilliantly and we don't even have to remember to switch them out before we render so if you have a little bit of a slower system some this should work beautifully for you if you want to learn more about special workflow tips and everything we have a course for that Pro editing workflow in DaVinci Resolve it's available now at groundcontrol.film yeah so I hope this is helpful for all of you and I it was helpful for me I love this proxy workflow it's so good oh so good it's like a toasted peanut butter sandwich on a cold day probably is

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 55,022

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, fusion, davinci resolve 18 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, video editing, how to edit 4k video in, how to edit 4k video in davinci resolve, how to use proxies, how to use proxies to edit 4k video fast, how to use proxies in davinci resolve, how to edit 4k video on, how to edit 4k video on slow computer

Id: JP_rXOQGbRM

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023