- Hey, guys, my name is Matt Johnson. And today I'm gonna be showing you how to create proxy files
using Adobe Premier Pro. And this technique is gonna enable you to massively speed up your video editing, regardless of the
resolution of your footage that you're working with, whether it's 1080p, 4K, 6K, even 8K. It doesn't matter. Even if you have an
older or slower computer, you're gonna be able to edit videos and cut through them like
butter using this technique. I also have a link down in the description of this video to download
my proxy preset files and sign up for my email newsletter. So, if you do not want
to have to go through the whole hassle of
creating your own presets using this tutorial, you
can just download mine and use them instead,
which should hopefully save you a bit of time. All right, let's open up Adobe Premier. All right, guys, welcome to
Adobe Premier Pro CC 2018. I'm gonna go up here to Help, About, and you can see that I'm
running version 12.1.0. If you are running an earlier version, you should be okay, as
long as you're running at least Premier Pro CC 2016. Which is the year that they introduced the proxy file workflow for Premier. So, as long as you're at
least running that version, you should be okay. If you're not, well then, I
would recommend upgrading, 'cause the rest of this
tutorial is not gonna be very useful for you. Moving on. As you can see, I've already
created a project here and imported some A7S2 clips, as well as a clip from my Phantom 4 Pro. All these clips are currently set to 23.976 frames per second at 3840 by 2160. So big stinkin' 4K video
clips at very high resolution. These things are gonna
be a pain to play back. But, let's see how they
do on our timeline here. This is some footage that I shot at the Glacier Lagoon in Iceland. Very, very pretty. In 4K, it looks great. But if I start scrubbing through it here, you can see there's definitely
a little bit of lag. And if I go over here to
the Phantom 4 Pro clips, you can see that there's
about a second in between it loading every single
part of this clip here. Because this is an H265 video file. It is very large. So if I click through here
and wait for it to load and I play it, it'll play okay, but it definitely will drop some frames. And if you're starting to shift around through things here,
this is kind of a pain. Because I'm like, wait,
which clip am I on? And if I wanna edit quickly,
that can be difficult. Thankfully, if I go
over here and press this Toggle Proxies button,
you're gonna first notice there's this proxy icon that appears that I created, and then whenever I start scrubbing through... Wow, look how smooth that is. That is smooth as butter. Hit play, plays back immediately. Play again. I love proxy files. And now I'm gonna show
you how to create them. First thing that you need to know is that I actually shot these video clips at 29.97 frames per second. And then I interpreted them to 23.976. And if your eyes are glazing
over and you're like, Matt, what the heck do those words mean? Do not not worry, I have
another video all about frame rates, that I would
highly recommend that you watch. It's not too long, but it goes
into detail about how and why I deal with different
frame rate video clips and why I interpreted this footage. I highly recommend watching that because I'm gonna be
applying what I talk about in that tutorial to this video. So, I'll have it linked up in the corner and down in the description
for you to watch. That way, you're not super confused about what's going on. With that out of the way, let's look at how I would create a proxy file. So I'm gonna go up here to
one of these video clips and I'm gonna select it, right-click, and I'm gonna go down to
Proxy, Create Proxies. And that's gonna open
up the Create Proxies dialog box here. And as you can see, we have a format that we can select and a preset. You've probably noticed by now that this GoPro Cineform preset is not a preset that you currently have available in your editing software. And that's because this is a custom preset that I created for my proxy files. And it's something that I'm gonna walk you through how to do right now. Also, you can just
download this preset file down in the description if
you wanted to save time. Let's create this preset. We're gonna hit Cancel, 'cause
we don't need that window. And we're gonna open
up Adobe Media Encoder. I love this program, the Swiss army knife of video encoding, I love it. Whenever you have Adobe
Media Encoder open, you're gonna go over here
to the preset browser. If you do not have the
preset browser visible, you're gonna go up here to Window and select Preset Browser. And it will magically appear. Under Preset Browser,
you're gonna wanna ignore all this stuff, and
you're gonna wanna select the plus icon that says Create New Preset. And then you're gonna select
Create Encoding Preset and that will open up the
encoding preset dialog box. Under Preset Name, we do not
need to name this preset yet, we'll do that at the end. For Format, this is very important. You're gonna wanna make sure
that QuickTime is selected. And then for Based on
Preset, mine currently says New Preset. If yours doesn't say that for some reason, you can always select any
of these other presets if you want to. NTSC DV 24p, for example. It does not matter which one you select because we're gonna customize everything. Do not worry about it. If you do have the option, select GoPro Cineform YUV 10-bit. That'll save you a little bit of time. Next, you wanna make
sure that Export Video and Export Audio are both checked because our proxy files are
gonna need video and audio. And then, I want you to go down here to the Video tab. Under Video Codec, you're
gonna wanna make sure that you have GoPro Cineform selected. Cineform is what is known
as a intermediate Codec. Meaning that it is
optimized for video editing. It is not heavily compressed, it is very quick to scrub
through, very quick to edit, I'm a big fan of editing with it. Also, the other reason that I recommend selecting GoPro Cineform is that it is a platform-agnostic video codec. Meaning that it works on Mac
and it works on PC equally. There is no difference between the two. It works across both platforms. If you are on a Mac, you could
select the Pro-Res option if you have that, but
currently, I'm on a PC so I cannot select
Pro-Res, so I use Cineform and I'm really happy with how it looks. Under Basic Video Settings
now, you're gonna see that we have a ton of options. For Quality, I wanna drag
this all the way down to 1. Because this is a proxy
video file, I do not need it to be massive quality, I do
not need crazy resolution. I'm more so looking for
minimum of everything so I save space on my hard
drive and so I can edit it as quickly as possible. Now, under that we have
a lot of other settings that we need to adjust here. First width and height. That is currently set to Based On Source. But we wanna check this box
here and we want to change the width to 1280 and the height to 720. If your width and height
icons are changing strangely, make sure this little chain
here has a slash through it. That way you can change
the numbers independently. The reason that I select
1280 by 720 is that it is 720p HD resolution. I use HD lightly here. It's very low-grade HD. But the reason that I like
1280 by 720 is that I find that whenever you pair
it with a Quality 1, it is just enough quality
for you to be able to see what's going on, but in terms
of size, it's not massive. So that's a really nice balance. That's why I prefer having my
height and width set to that. Next, we have Frame Rate,
Field Order, and Aspect. And those are currently
all set to Based On Source. But what I find is that sometimes Adobe can be a little crazy
whenever you're letting it choose things on its own, so I prefer to customize all of these as well. So I'm gonna uncheck all
three of these boxes. For Frame Rate, I'm
gonna set it to 23.976, which, looking up here, that
matches with my frame rate of all of my video clips. So I wanna make sure
that my proxy frame rate matches up with my
native video frame rate. That way, there isn't
some weird disconnect between how they both work together, which we will talk about
later, do not worry. For Field Order, you're gonna
wanna select Progressive. And for Aspect, you're gonna
wanna select Square Pixels 1.0. That is the standard for what most cameras are shooting with these days. Those two settings, so you should be good. As far as Render at Maximum Depth goes, I do not want that checked
because I do not need that maximum depth because I
am just making proxy files. For depth, YUV 10-bpc is good. Ignore all the rest of this. Do not check Use Maximum Render Quality because this is a proxy
file, we do not need maximum render quality for that. Next, let's go up here to the Effects tab. And you're gonna see there
are a ton of settings here. You do not need to concern yourself with any of these except for one. Namely, the Image Overlay
box, we're gonna check that. And that's gonna bring
up this little box here that currently says Applied: None. This is where we're gonna
add that nice little Adobe proxy overlay over here. So if you download my proxy preset files linked in the description of this video, I will include this proxy image here that you can then use as an image overlay. And the reason that I like
using an image overlay is that I can tell at a glance, am I working with my proxy files, or am I working with
my native video files? Premier doesn't make it super obvious, so I prefer having a proxy image overlay where I can tell at a glance,
oh, I'm editing my proxies. That makes things a
little bit easier for me. I now need to navigate to that
image file on my computer. So wherever you have
downloaded it to, you're gonna go over here to None and
you're gonna select Choose. That it is gonna open
up your file dialog box and you're gonna wanna navigate to where your image is saved. I'm gonna select my
proxy logo png file here and select Open. And then it's gonna let me
choose where I want the logo to be positioned on the screen. In this case, I'm gonna go
and select bottom right. Because I don't like
it being in the middle, I find the bottom right works pretty well. With the image overlay
added, the only thing that we need to do is now go
up here and name our presets. So I'm going to erase New
Preset, and let's call this Cineform 1280x720 23.976
Quality 1 Watermarked. Because that way, I can tell at a glance exactly which preset I am selecting. This has all of my settings
that I need to know right here. Let's go down here and select OK. And ta-da, look. Under User Presets & Groups, there is our preset that we made. Congratulations! We're halfway there. Well, further than halfway.
We're almost done, don't worry. Next, we need to go up here
to the plus icon again, and we're gonna select
Create Ingest Preset, which is different from
an encoding preset. That's gonna open up the
Ingest Preset dialog box. And the reason we have to
create an Ingest preset is because that is the kind of
preset that Premier supports for proxy files. I know it's weird. Now, with the Ingest
Preset Settings box open, you'll notice first that
there are significantly less settings that we have
to deal with than we did with the other preset, which, woo-hoo, that's very good news. Now, under Transfer,
you do not need to have Copy Files to Destination box checked. Ignore that. Transcode Files to Destination
is very important, though, so make sure that you have that checked. And under Destination, yours probably says some random older folder
that you've been working in, and you're like, why is that selected? In this case, it's an old wedding project that I haven't worked on in forever. The destination does not matter. Yes, this preset, as
far as destination goes, does not matter. Do not worry about whatever
folder it's pointing to. If yours is not pointing
to a folder, just pick a random folder on your computer. Because, as far as your destination goes, that is gonna be customized
every single time that you create proxies. And those proxies are
gonna be put into a folder next to your main video file. So, the destination does not matter. That is going to be changed whenever you are creating proxies. Do not worry about that. In my case, I'm just
gonna leave it as this old wedding film folder
and not worry about it. Underneath it, though,
we have two settings that are very important, though. Namely, Format. You're gonna wanna make sure that you have QuickTime selected for your format. And then for your preset,
you're gonna select the dropdown here. And we're gonna select the
preset that we just made. Namely, Cineform 1280x720
23.976 Quality 1 Watermarked. I want that preset selected. So, with that selected,
the only thing I need to do is go up here to Preset
Name and let's name this Cineform 1280x720 23-point,
does this look familiar? Yeah, 23.976 Quality 1 Watermarked Ingest. We'll call it Ingest so
that way we can make sure that we can differentiate
between these two presets. With that done, let's hit OK. And suddenly, you're gonna see down here that we have another user
preset called the same thing but it has Ingest at the end. And that is the preset that we are now going to import into Adobe Premier to create our proxy files. To import this preset file into Premier, I need to know where
it is on my hard drive. So I'm going to right-click
on the Ingest preset here and I'm gonna go down
to Reveal Preset File. And that's gonna open
up deep in the recesses of my Adobe Programs
folder where my presets are currently residing. And as you can see, there is the .epr file that we created. What you need to do is make
sure you remember exactly where this preset file is on your computer. In my case, I can look up here and see the exact folder that it's in. But if you're on a Mac,
this file may be saved to a different location. Regardless, you need to
make sure that you know where this file is on your computer. With having properly noted where this file is located now, I'm gonna
minimize this window, minimize my Adobe Media Encoder Window, and go back into Premier here. I'm going to right-click
on one of my video files and I'm gonna go to Proxy, Create Proxies. And that is gonna bring up the old Create Proxies dialog box. Remember this? I'm now gonna click on Add Ingest Preset. And that's gonna bring up
the file browser dialog box. And as you can see,
it's currently asking me for a .epr file. Does that look familiar? Yeah, because I just told
you that we need to remember exactly where that file
is on the computer. If you've already forgotten, do not worry. As I told you, only minimize this window so you can see, hey, here's
exactly where this file is. So let's dig through here and find it. My goodness, that is
buried, but there it is. With this preset that we
just created selected, we're gonna select Open,
and ta-da, it now appears as a preset that we can select here in the Create Proxies dialog box. Remember how whenever we were setting up the Ingest preset and
I was telling you that the destination does not matter for where you're putting the
proxies on your hard drive? The reason it does not matter is because of this little window right here. Under Destination, it says
Next to Original Media in Proxy Folder. So that means, any time that
you are creating proxies, they're gonna be put next
to the original video files in another folder labeled Proxies. So they're not gonna be buried
in some old wedding folder, they're not gonna be
buried on whatever folder on your hard drive you selected
during the Ingest process, they're gonna be put
next to your video files. Very easy and simple to locate them, which I'm a big fan of. Now with that out of the
way, let's make some proxies. I'm gonna select Cancel here, and then I'm gonna go back up here and select both of these video clips. Because I want to make
proxies for both clips that I shot with my A7S2. Gonna right-click on them. Go to Proxy, Create Proxies, and that's gonna bring up the Create Proxies dialog box again. I need to make sure that my preset here is properly selected. And all of my other settings are good, so we're gonna press OK. And it's gonna say Creating Proxy Jobs. Let's go down here to Media Encoder. And you're gonna see that both video clips are now here in Media Encoder and they're already processing very quickly. Look at that. Just screaming through 'em. So great. Proxy files are made
very quickly in Cineform. I'm a big fan of that. We're already done, okay. Now, I'm gonna click up here on one of the proxy output files. And that opens up the
folder that they're kept in. And as you can see,
here are my proxy files. And then if I go up a folder,
there are the native files. So they're kept in a nice
little neat and tidy folder right next to the main ones. That is so great. Let's minimize this window, minimize the Adobe Media Encoder window, and we're back into Premier. We have no way of telling
if our proxy values have been made, do we? Oh, wait, yeah, we do. Let's go over here and hit the little Toggle Proxies button. Boom! Look at that. There is the proxy logo. So now I can tell that these are proxies, and look at that, they're
playing, look at that. Man, that's awesome. Two other things that
we need to talk about that are very important. First, whenever I am creating proxy files, imagine that I have an A7S2 folder here for one camera that has
like 400 clips in it, and then I have another A7S2 folder here that has another 400 clips
in it from another camera. Whenever I am creating
proxy files for those two different cameras, I wanna
make sure that I create the proxy files separately. So I'll select all 400
clips for one camera and I will create those proxy files. Then I will select all the 400
clips from the other camera and I will create those proxy files. The reason I want those to be separate is that I found that occasionally, Adobe can get a little bit screwy and it isn't sure exactly where it
saved the proxy files to. So you may end up with your folder here, where, suddenly, all of your proxies from all your cameras are in one folder. And that can be kind of
insane and a pain to organize. So I find that by rendering
out my proxy files separately per camera,
I'm prevented from Premier getting confused and having to reorganize things later on. The second thing that
we need to talk about, and this is also very
important for some of you. If you are a person who, like me, interprets your video
footage, so you shoot at 30 frames per second,
60 frames per second, and then you interpret
your video footage into 24 frames per second for exporting, then you need to listen to this
part because I'm gonna explain to you how to use proxies properly whenever you're interpreting your footage. But, if you are somebody that shoots in 24 frames per second, edits
in 24 frames per second, and exports to 24 frames per second, or shoots at 30, edits
at 30, exports to 30, or 60, et cetera, et
cetera, then you do not need to listen to me now and you can just turn off the video,
download the presets and have a good time. But, if you're a person who
interprets your footage, this is very important. This is also the part
where I plead with you to go watch my frame rates video, which is still linked in the corner and down in the description as well. Now, let me explain to
you what the big deal is if you interpret your
footage and use proxy files. And, it's easier for me just to show you. So, here are my video clips, untouched. These are the native
clips, you can tell by how slowly they're loading. Let's go over here and let's
turn on our proxy files. And boom! Look at that. Suddenly, smooth editing. But, I'm gonna stop about right here and I'm gonna start toggling
the proxies off and on. And you notice what's happening. Off, on, off, on. The perspective's changing. Why is the perspective changing? Because the frame rate for our proxies does not match up with the frame rate for our native video clips. Yes, this is a major
issue because you need to make sure that your proxies
match up frame for frame with your native video clips. And in this case, it's not happening. Why is that? Well, the issue is that
whenever you interpret your footage in Premier by
right-clicking on your clip, going up to Modify, Interpret Footage, and you're changing your frame rate here. You can see here that it was 29.97, and I've turned it to 23.98. The issue is, that whenever I go to create that proxy file, Adobe Media Encoder does not read from this dialog box, so it does not know
that I have interpreted my footage to 23.98. As far as Adobe Media
Encoder is concerned, it thinks that I am currently editing at 29.97 frames per second. So, my proxy files are
29.97 frames per second but my native files are 23.976. You can see the disconnect here, that is gonna cause
major issues in editing. So how do we fix this? How do we make the frame
rate of our proxy files match up with the frame rate
of our native video files? Well, I have good news for you, there is a workaround. What I first need to do
is I need to go and delete the bad proxy file. So I'm gonna go back to my
proxies folder for the A7S2. I'm gonna select these two proxy files that do not match up with the frame rate. I'm gonna press Delete,
and now they're gone. Going back here into Premier, it's confused for a second
and then they disappear. And now we don't have
proxy files to worry about. But we need to create new proxy files. So I'm going to select both
of these video clips again, right-click, select Proxy, Create Proxies, and then with my Cineform
preset that I made selected, I'm gonna press OK. Just like I did before. But I'm gonna go down
here to Media Encoder and I'm gonna watch it
add the two proxy files for rendering, and then I'm
gonna press Stop and select No. And that is going to stop the render of these two proxy files. So they are now sitting
here in Media Encoder ready to be rendered if I hit play, but I don't wanna do that yet. First, I'm going to
select both of these clips by pressing Control A, which
will select everything, so imagine that you have
like 400 video clips. You can press Control
A, or Command A on Mac, and that's going to select
all of the video clips here. And I'm going to right-click and I'm gonna select Reset Status. So that is going to reset all of them so that they can be rendered again. Then I'm gonna select the output file for one of these video clips,
it does not matter which one. And that's gonna open up the
folder where the proxies are and as you can see, it had already started to generate a proxy file,
but it's only one megabyte, it didn't make it that far. We're going to select this video file and we're gonna delete it because I do not want any half-made proxies that have the wrong frame rate. So I need all of those gone. I'm gonna close this window. And back here in Media Encoder, I'm gonna press Control A again
to select all of my clips, and then I'm going to right-click and select Interpret Footage. Does that look familiar? My goodness. That is gonna bring up the
Interpret Footage dialog box, which looks incredibly familiar, just like the one in Premier. What you do need to be aware of is that opening up this dialog box
can take quite a while. If you have 400 clips,
500 clips, 1,000 clips, this Interpret Footage dialog box can take anywhere from five minutes
to open to 10 minutes, it's taken 20 minutes before, depending on the speed of your computer
and your hard drives. So this can take quite a while to open. I wish it was faster, Adobe
needs to figure that out. But just so you're aware, if it looks like your computer has frozen
up whenever you clicked Interpret Footage, do not worry. It is not frozen up, it is probably still going through in the background, preparing to open up this dialog box. Let's go down here under Frame Rate, and I'm gonna select
Assume This Frame Rate. And I'm gonna type 23.976, which happens to match up perfectly with
the frame rate over here for our native video files. Then I'm gonna press OK. And just like whenever you
pressed Interpret Footage the first time, Adobe Media Encoder may take quite a while to accept this change. Once that is done, though,
you can double-check it by right-clicking on
just one of the clips. You do not need to select all of them, just right-click on one. Interpret Footage, you can see that it has accepted this change. And now, I'm going to press Play. And that's gonna render out our proxy video clips here very quickly. I love how fast that is. I'm telling you, if everything was just proxy video quality size,
things would be so quick. Unfortunately, it's not. With that now done, let's
minimize Adobe Media Encoder. And let's go back over here to Premier. And I'm gonna press the
Toggle Proxies button here. And you'll notice that it's not working. Because, occasionally,
what can happen is that one of the proxy files
will become detached. If I scrub over here, you'll see that this proxy file is active,
but not the first one. If you ever have proxy files that are not connected properly, you
can just right-click on the video file that
matches up with the one that is not connected. Right-click, go to Proxy, Attach Proxies, and that's gonna open up the
Attach Proxies dialog box. You'll click Attach,
and that's gonna open up a media browser window here, and then you can select your proxy. It's looking for the proxy to C0104. Here's the C0104 proxy. Let's hit OK. And now, that proxy is
attached to the video clip. So I can now scrub through it here, look how buttery smooth this is. And let's turn it off and
on and see the proxy file and the native video file
are now matched up perfectly between the two. And we're done. Congratulations. So yes, it can take a little while to initially create proxies,
but once you have done it and you see how smooth it
is to be editing a proxy versus editing a native 4K file, ooh! Totally worth it. I am a huge fan. And that's my entire
proxy footage workflow. I hope it helps you out. In case you haven't yet,
you can still download my proxy preset files
down in the description of this video. And as always, if you have
any questions or comments, please feel free to leave one below or get in touch with me through
my website, whoismatt.com. It is also a massive, proxy footage-sized, well, no, not that, 'cause
those are actually quite small. It is a native resolution
footage-sized help to me if you would consider liking
this video and subscribing if you wanna see more videos
like this in the future. I also have a ton of links
down in the description to my Instagram, to my Facebook, to sign up for consulting,
all of that is down there in the description if
you wanna check it out. Thank you so much for
watching and have a great day.
