How to Edit FAST with Proxy Files || Final Cut Pro X (FCPX)

so let's talk about proxy files now if you're editing footage that was shot in say 4k or 8k or a higher frame rate to accommodate slow motion like 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second you might notice some issues when playing that footage back and thus have trouble rendering and working on it within your editor being able to generate proxy files is one of the key ways that you'll be able to actually transcode this footage down into a resolution and codec that you'll be able to work with and edit with smoothly and then be able to export it back into whatever resolution or frame rate you desired for it to be in in the first place now i'm a final cut pro user myself and so there are a few keys and tricks to learn in terms of generating proxy files which we're going to talk about here but it's also worth knowing when you're going to want to create proxy files so i want to talk through the when and in what situations you'll want to do this before we even get to the how in this case so here in final cut pro i've created a library and a project called proxy example which we're going to use to demonstrate when you might want to create proxy files in the first place so for this specific example we're going to look at footage from a recent wedding i shot and specifically three different kinds of footage from two different cameras in various frame rates and codecs that might have an impact in terms of us being able to edit this footage so this first clip we have here in c1 was actually shot on my sony a73 and 4208 bit in 4k resolution and 24 frames per second now the second clip which was also from the ceremony portion of the day was shot on my sony a7s3 also in 4k resolution and in 24 frames per second however in 422 10 bit rather than for 208 bit now the third clip was also shot on my sony a7 s3 shot in 4k resolution however this was shot in 60 frames per second also in four to two 10-bit now the reality is while it might seem that these cameras are similar and that they're all shot in 4k resolution just even choosing a different bit rate say from 8-bit to 10-bit or chroma sub-sampling from 420 to 422 or frame rate from 24 to 60 frames per second can make a difference in in this case my 2019 macbook pro's ability to edit and playback this footage smoothly so as we play back through this footage here you'll see the first clip is playing back pretty smoothly i would say rendering each frame by frame and really not dropping too many frames here and so it seems like it can play back the a7 3 for 208 bit footage and 4k 24 pretty smoothly without any issues now in looking at the footage from my sony a7s 3 in 4k 24 but 422 10 bit you can see in this case there doesn't seem to be any jumping or missed frames going on here as this is getting played back so in this case we might not have an issue editing this footage as well potentially however we're going to start seeing some jumping and issues is with this 4k 60 frames per second footage which is just shot in a higher bit rate in general and is just going to contain a lot more information that this computer is going to have difficulty trying to unpack and play back so as you can see here as i'm attempting to play back the 4k 60 frames per second footage this is not looking very good we're dropping a bunch of frames it's looking pretty jumpy and my ability to attempt to cut this or render this up would be pretty difficult in final cut pro as it stands right now and yes as one example as you're seeing on screen right now you might encounter a similar error in final cut pro when you're attempting to play back footage that final cut pro is having trouble itself rendering and playing back so whether it's this explicit warning coming up and prompting you or just you noticing a bunch of different dropped frames and the inability to be able to play back the footage smoothly you should be able to know within final cut pro and watching your footage back when you might want to and need to create proxy files so since we now know when to create proxy files the question might be well how do we accomplish this so there's a couple of ways you can technically approach this within final cut pro let's say we want to actually create proxies for the clips that we've already imported into our librarian event so specifically here because our 4k 24 for 208 bit footage and our 4k 24 422 10 bit footage seem to be playing back fine i'm mostly only concerned with playing back our 4k 60 frames per second footage right now and making sure that we generate proxies for that so let's just address this one clip as of right now so to do that i'm actually going to click on the source clip itself and you'll notice the option to transcode media so when you click on this you're going to have the option to create either optimized media or proxy media as we've selected here already we're going to create proxy media so you'll notice we'll here either have the option to create a prores proxy or an h.264 based proxy for the codec now my preferred option for this is to choose prores proxy since prores just tends to edit like butter and is extremely smooth in final cut pro given that it is an apple based codec and also choose the 50 option so this is going to considerably shrink the size of our proxy files down now of course you can choose a smaller percentage or even up to a given resolution as another means of setting that however my take on this is up to a certain percentage if you go too small you're going to notice some pretty significant quality loss in final cut pro when you're editing and this might have a negative impact in terms of you being able to edit and work on the footage and color grade it and so on so once we've set these options we will just select okay now of course if we want to check on the status of our proxies and generating them we can check on the background tasks area click that and you'll notice the transcoding and analysis section this will show us a list of all the single clips that we are making proxies for and report on the percentage of that as it's happening one thing to keep in mind is that if you do start to try to edit and do things in the timeline while proxies are being generated the actual proxy import and generation process will be paused so you might actually want to allow some time for proxies to be generated for your project especially if you're importing multiple clips this is something you might want to let run while you go take the dog out or do the laundry or something to that extent all right and so as you can see the proxy creation process for this particular clip is about to be complete and so we should be able to check on things now in final cut pro and see if we notice any difference now that we've created a proxy file for this particular large and difficult to playback clip now there are a couple of additional things here i do want to point out though so if you're curious as to which clip has proxies created for it and which clips do not what you'll be able to do is say if i click on this 4k 24 10 bit 422 clip that we didn't create a proxy for just within the info tab of final cut pro if i scroll down into the available media representations you will see that proxy has a red dot next to it as is optimized which means in this case we have not made proxy or optimized files for it however if we select our 4k 60 frames per second clip that we just made a proxy for when we look at its info tab you will notice that proxy has a green dot next to it and actually shows that we've created a prores 422 proxy for this clip so being able to check the info inspector is going to be one way that you can judge whether a clip has had proxy media created for it or not however what you're going to notice is when we're still trying to play this clip back is that we're still having many dropped frames and this is still having and showing difficulty in playing back the clip in this case within final cut pro we actually have to change one additional thing while we're editing to ensure that we're actually utilizing the proxies that we generated so if we go up to the view tab here you're going to notice a few different options in terms of media playback generally what you're going to find is that final cut pro is usually often set as a default to optimize slash original when playing back footage meaning it is essentially using the full original files when it is playing back and rendering and when you're editing that footage however there are two additional options you can choose from when working with proxies and perhaps one in particular that you may want to select over the other depending on your proxy workflow what i'm going to first do is show what it looks like when i switch this over to proxy only and what you're going to see is that suddenly these other clips we haven't made proxies for show that well we are missing proxies for these clips if you choose proxy only you will essentially have to ensure that essentially every clip you've imported into your library and your project is utilizing and has proxies generated for it so this is only a viable option if you've decided to make proxies for every single clip within your project and this may or may not be something you actually need to do so there is one other option that you can choose which is going to be more applicable in this particular case in this case if i go back to media playback and instead of proxy only choose proxy preferred what you'll now see is we have all the different clips here shown and should be ready for playback and we do not have any indication that any single clip is missing or that it cannot play back any one of them this is because in proxy preferred final cut pro is going to use proxy files when it can and when they've been generated and in all other cases will just default back to the original media that was imported so now that we've set final cut pro to use the proxies you should see this playback a lot smoother and of course as we go back to the start of this file as we start to play back this 4k 60 frames per second footage shot in 42 to 10 bit you're seeing this is playing back super smoothly and correctly just as we would have expected it to and this is primarily and really solely because of the proxy that we generated for it now we did show how to take an existing file you've imported and create proxies for it but what about if you're importing a net new clip or series of clips that you want to generate proxies for itself in this case we can just go up to the import window here and we will select a new clip that we'll want to create proxies for now once we've selected that clip much like we had in the option to transcode media with the file we already imported you'll see a trans code section here in the media import window and this will allow us as well to create proxy media again i'm going to choose the same files that i did before utilizing a prores proxy and 50 and we will let this generate as well all right and as the proxy file generation wraps up on this particular clip let's test some things much like we did with the previous one so since we've set this to proxy preferred you'll notice this clip is now playing back very smoothly as we'd expect however if i were to instead change this again back to optimize media you're going to notice the same drop frames issue we had initially with the other clip of the room getting ready and so again this is why we're going to want to edit in proxy only if we've generated proxy files for essentially every single clip within our project within the library or we'll want to choose proxy preferred if we have sort of a heterogeneous mix of just original files and some proxy generated media now one last thing i want to call out is if you've set your project to either proxy preferred or proxy only and you attempt to export your project in this state you'll notice that final cut pro is going to give you a warning that you're still using proxy media and attempting to create an export using this would actually result in a degraded and reduced quality version therefore you're going to want to make sure that you basically just set this back to optimized and original and let final cut kind of re-render this before you do your final export since as a quick example of that if i switch this back to optimize and original you will notice that i can now attempt to essentially export this and final cut pro will not give me a warning of any kind so in summary that is a rundown on when you'll want to make proxies and how to do that in a couple of different ways in final cut pro now hopefully this little tutorial has been of some help to you feel free to leave a like and subscribe if it was i'm definitely planning on doing more final cut pro tutorials in the future and already have a couple on this channel that i will link to in the description below that is all i have to say so thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Andrew Saraceni

Views: 9,506

Keywords: proxy files, proxies, final cut pro x, final cut pro, final cut, fcpx, sony, a7s iii, fx3, a7 iii, xavc s, xavc hs, xavc s-i, long gop, all i, all intra, 4k 24fps, 4k 60fps, 8-bit 4:2:0, 10-bit 4:2:2, optimized/original, optimized media, proxy preferred, proxy only, prores proxy, h.264, h.265

Id: LJIJa8JZVHQ

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021