Today I'm going to be showing you how to edit super fast
using proxies in DaVinci Resolve. And you're going to be able to go from
editing videos like this slow and clunky where it takes a second to load at times, especially
if you're scrubbing around on the timeline to this where you can scrub
through your timeline like a hot knife. through butter
And now I'm really hungry. Dang it. You see how smooth
this is? It's very impressive. And what's great is that these proxies are going to work
and make your editing fast. Even if you're on a very old computer
or using a slow external hard drive, etc., it doesn't matter. Your editing is going to be super fast. also linked out in the video description
to my DaVinci Resolve proxy cheat sheet, which is going to show you all of the exact settings
that you need to use to create proxies. This cheat sheet is completely free,
so please download it because it can help
save you time. Creating proxies. Also more good news for you. This tutorial is going to apply regardless
of whether you're using the paid
or free version of DaVinci results. Even if you're using the free version. Everything's going to work for you. Lastly, I do want you to know
that if you're editing videos with mixed frame rates,
which I have a tutorial about, and I will link to it up in the corner
and down in the video description. There is one quirk that we need to talk
about, and I will cover that. Toward the end of this video. I'll put a time stamp
in the description for you. If you're looking for it and you're
coming for that video and I also cover this quirk in the cheat sheet
that you can download down below. Jumping right into creating proxies,
then the first thing that you're going to want to do is go to your project
settings in DaVinci Resolve, and then you're going to want to scroll
down to this optimized media and render cache section
where it says Proxy media resolution. Because here is where you can select
the resolution of your proxies that resolve is going
to create by default. It's going to say that it's
going to choose them automatically. But you don't want it to do that. We want to tell resolve what we want. Specifically, I recommend
choosing the quarter size proxies because this should give you a good
resolution proxy that still plays back very smoothly. But do be aware
that if you're using a much older computer or you're creating these proxies
and you start playing back your video
and it's still slow and stuttery when editing, you can drop this lower
down to one eighth or 1/16. We'll leave it on a quarter though. then for proxy media format,
I would recommend choosing 8.264, which should playback smoothly
and pretty much any computer these days. And most importantly,
it will also give you a very small file size
so you don't have your proxies clogging up your hard drive,
taking up a ton of space. Then down here, under working
folders, you're going to see that you have options to choose
where you want your proxy generated media to be put, but you're actually
not going to use the setting. You can completely ignore it
because there's a better way to tell resolve
where to save your proxy files. So hit save on this menu because these are all the settings that
you're going to customize for this menu. But now we need to go to another menu. Yes, we're going to go up here
to DaVinci Resolve preferences. Yes, there is another complete separate Settings menu because Resolve loves
having a lot of menus. And here you're going to want to go to media storage
and next to proxy generation and location. look at that. Remember I just told you that
there's a better way to tell Resolve
where to save your proxies? Well,
this is where you choose that location. By default, resolve
is going to be set to use project setting, which is where you would use the setting
in the previous menu that we ignored that will let you choose
a specific folder. And the reason that we ignored
that setting is you do not want resolved
to be putting all of your proxy files for all of your video projects
in the same folder. If you're just editing one project,
they may be fine, but every time you create a new project,
you would have the same folder filling up with proxy files and you forget to delete it
and it would be a huge pain. so. Instead, you're going to select
the option that says proxy subfolders in media
file locations, which means that any time
you generate proxies for your videos, they're going to be put in a neat and tidy folder
right next to the native video files, so you'll always know where they are
and you're not going to have some random folder filling up on your hard
drive as a plus to whenever you are done editing your video,
you're going to very easily be able to find these proxy files and delete them
to clear up space on your hard drive. Now let's it's safe. The next thing you need to know
is that creating proxies in resolve is incredibly simple
after you get the basic settings we just covered dialed in. So if you're noticing that your footage is not playing back
smoothly or the program is taking a second or two to respond,
let's make some proxies to do that. All you have to do is import your footage
like I have done here, and then select your footage by either clicking and dragging or pressing
controller on PC or command on Mac. Right. Clicking on one of the video
clips and selecting generate proxy media resolve this, then going to immediately
pop up windows saying that it is generating your proxies and depending
on the speed of your computer and how many proxies you're
wanting to generate, this could take anywhere from a few
seconds to a few minutes to a few hours. It really depends in my case. For this tutorial
it only took about a minute. And then as you can see here on the video
clips, there is a new icon that says p x y, which stands for proxy, which indicates the result
is using the proxy for this video clip. and so if I click on another couple
and drag them down here to the timeline and start dragging around,
look at how smooth that is. It's like,
wow, wow, wow, wow. It's just crazy. Lightspeed fast. I love it. Do you see just how quick and smooth
proxies are going to make editing? It's pretty magical. Also side note,
there's also the proxy icon down here for your clips on the timeline. So
they're not just appear in the media pool. You're always going to know
if you have proxies or not. Now, let's say that
you want to disable your proxies because maybe you want to see
how your native files look, maybe
because you needing to zoom in on the 4K file and you're color grading it,
you want to make sure it looks good, etc.. Well, in that case, it's very simple. To disable these,
all you have to do is go up to playback proxy handling
and it's like prefer camera originals. When you do
this, resolve is going to switch back to the native camera files
and stop using the proxies. And you're also going to see that
it's swapped out the proxy icon for this HQ icon, which stands for high quality. And then if you ever want
to switch back to proxies, all you have to do is go up here
to playback proxy handling prefer proxies, and we're back,
maybe back to proxies again. In addition,
if you ever want to completely disable your proxies, you can do that by going up
to the same proxy handling menu and then selecting disable proxies, which is like a way of telling yourself,
really don't use these proxies and then it'll be a good program
and it'll listen to you. Now, I'm sure you may be wondering, Matt,
if I create proxies whenever I'm done editing my video and I go over here
to export, it is resolved. Going to use these proxies
when exporting the video, and then the video would be all
low quality and grossly rendered out. No resolve is smart enough to know that you would never want
to use the proxies export and by default it's always going to choose the native video files
whenever it comes time for you to export. So you do not need to stress or worry
about changing some sort of obscure setting to make sure that your native
files are used when you export results. Going to handle that. It's really awesome. Now we aren't done yet. Okay, stick with me
because the next thing I'm going to show you is super cool
and completely worth your time, especially for someone that has a lot of footage
that you need to make proxies for. Let's say you're filming a wedding and
you have 300 or 400 video clips or more. If you're editing something like that. This same technique that I showed you
of selecting all of your video clips and then right clicking on them
and selecting generate proxy media will be a problem in that if you do things
this way, resolve is basically going to say, you want to create proxies,
great, let's let's create some proxies. It's then going to pop up
that generate proxy media box and it's not going to let you do anything in the program
until the proxies are created. You're going to be clicking around
and it ain't going to be responding because, sorry,
I'm making proxies right now. Now that is fine If you only have a few
video clips like we have in this example. But if you have hundreds,
this could potentially take hours to resolve to create all these proxies and it means that you are going
to be really unproductive. Isn't that a bummer? Wouldn't
you like to be able to keep editing while the proxies are being created? I think that's a great idea and thankfully so does Blackmagic,
the creators of DaVinci Resolve. So what you're going to do
if you're on Windows is you're going to go down to your START menu and you're going
to search for Blackmagic proxy generate. Or if you're on Mac, you'll find this same program
in your applications folder. And here's the great news. Regardless of whether you're using the paid studio version of Resolve
or the free version, this Blackmagic proxy Generator app is included
with both versions of the programs. With the free version, it's going to be
called Blackmagic Proxy generator light, but it's almost the exact same
with the only difference being
that it can't export ten bit proxies, but you're going to be using ten bit
proxies anyways, so it doesn't matter. And the light version of this app works
great. open the program
and you're going to discover that the Blackmagic Proxy Generator
app is very basic, which is a good thing. Here's how to quickly set up. First, you have three options for quality
under proxy format here each 2648 bit half rez ten, ATP 82648, bit ten ATP or 265 ten ATP
or if you're using lite version, it's going to say eight two, six,
five, eight bit ten ATP. but yeah, that's the only difference. in your case you're going to want
to select that 2648 bit half rez ten ATP which is the lowest quality proxy
that you can make with this program and it should play back the most smoothly
when editing next you're going to see that there's a watch folder section here at the bottom of this program,
and this is where you can tell the proxy generator app where the video files are
that you want to make the proxies for. To do this, all you have to do
is simply navigate to the folder where your proxies are created
by clicking the add button. Navigate to the folder
where your files are kept and then click select folder and it will then appear
in the watch folders down here. Keep in mind
that if you have multiple video files from multiple cameras
that are in different folders, you can go to here and click add again
and select all of the folders where your video files are located and have multiple watch folders here
for resolve to use. Lastly, here's the best part. Simply click
the start button up here at the top and then the Black Magic proxy
generator will begin generating proxies. And you can go back to DaVinci Resolve
and continue editing while this separate app
generates the proxies in the background. And what's great is that as these
proxies are generated, you're going to see the proxy icon appear on your video
clips, individual result. As you add it, it's really magical. And once you start using proxies,
you're not going to want to go back. Now, like I said earlier in the video,
there is one caveat, one weird quirk that I want you to be aware of
whenever you are creating proxies. And that has to do with if you are making your footage,
slow motion and also creating proxies. so if you have followed
along with my mixed frame rates of 12 for resolve, which is linked up in the corner
and down in the video description, that tutorial is going to show you how to make all of your footage
slow motion at once, regardless of the frame rate
that you filmed it at. And it's going to save you a ton of time
because you don't need to go into all of your clips and right
click on them one by one until resolve. Hey, make this clip 40% speed
and go through all that. That's going to be really time consuming. So this technique is a huge time saver. But that said, if you do what I show you
in that tutorial where you import your footage, then you right
click on a clip in the media pool. Select clip attributes, and then change
the video frame rate to 23.976. You're going to want to be careful
when creating your proxies, because if you use this external black
magic proxy generator app to create your proxies, the generator app
does not recognize that you've made these clips slow motion, and then when you use it to create
proxies, it isn't going to link the proxies
to the native files automatically. And when you try to manually link the proxies, resolve is going to give you an error
saying that the frame rates do not match. So here's the workaround. If you make proxies using the Black Magic
Proxy Generator app before you go to clip attributes
and change the video frame rate, you are going to be fine
and the proxies will attach correctly and you will not get an error. but I hear you saying that I already imported all my footage
and I started putting it on the timeline and I changed the frame rate
in the clip attributes. And then I decided later on that
I wanted to make proxies. Is there a way to still generate proxies
without having this error? Yes. You will instead
need to use the built in proxy generation tool in DaVinci Resolve,
like I showed you early in the video by selecting your clips and resolve right clicking and selecting generate
proxy media by generating proxies. This way resolve is going to know,
you interpreted your footage to make a slow motion,
so I'll make the proxy slow motion as well and everything's
going to match up properly. Trust me, once you set up proxies
and start using them and you see how fast and smooth
your editing can be, you're never going to not want to use them
to edit your videos. Remember to you can still download
my proxy cheat sheet for DaVinci Resolve, which is going to be really helpful to you
as you get these proxy set up. It's completely free
and linked down in the video description. Also down on the video description, you'll find a link to my wedding
film framework for DaVinci Resolve course. Well, we'll walk you through how to edit an entire wedding film
into Vince your resolve. I would highly recommend checking it out. Thanks so much for watching. Please leave me a comment
and let me know what other tutorials you'd like to see for DaVinci Resolve
or anything else for that matter. And have a great day.
