Proxy Workflow | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

a lot of the times as an editor we don't really have the option of choosing what media we are using for our edit now if you're the person that's shooting the footage obviously you do let's say we don't have the opportunity of having the highest of high-end systems well depending on what media that we're bringing in to davinci resolve if it's raw files if it's just really high resolution files the data rates are going to be very high and that could be a strain on hard drives it could be a strain from upstream from there dealing with the processor the memory or the graphics card so is there a way that we could get a snappier more responsive timeline and not have to deal with kind of like a chuggy timeline and you know and a very unenjoyable experience when we're editing and the way to do that is using proxy files the cool thing with proxy files in a lot of the modern editors is that you can bring that proxy file in it is a linked secondary source so we have our primary source material and then we have this proxy that is also attached to that what we're going to be using to visually represent the source material is a lower a lower quality i guess the best way to put it a lower quality video file that lower quality video file is going to be what davinci resolve is going to be processing while we're editing so we're going to be editing with this smaller file that might not have the uh quality that we want our end product to be but it runs very fast on our system and because it's linked to the source material which is the stuff that came out of the camera or whatever we were given when we go to the end we have all of our edits on our timeline all on all this proxy stuff when we hit deliver on the deliver page and we render it out davinci resolve is going to go back and say oh this was linked to the source material that is really high resolution looks great we're going to be using that to have all of these edits on so we're using the proxies they look like crap on our system while we're editing but we can at least see what we're editing right and it's fast and it's snappy and it's a very good uh experience while we're editing and we're not waiting for a computer to try to process something because a lot of the times we're working in a small in a small program monitor and we're not looking at the full resolution anyways so we don't need to have that until the final render so because they're linked we'll still get the final render it'll look great but while we're editing we're editing off of these lower grade video clips um that our system will respond to a lot better so it sounds a little complicated it's not complicated at all um there are a couple of steps that we can that we have to take to set this up and by a couple steps it's like three clicks before we get started with today's video i just wanted to let you know about my website jrtv.com where we have hundreds of different templates available for davinci resolve 17 16 and 15. all of them are backwards compatible with the newest version of davinci resolve if you haven't taken a look the selection of templates is pretty diverse with everything that you would typically think when you think templates everything from titles transitions infographics logo stings slideshows video displays video effects compositing elements as well as a bunch of color preset tools specifically for davinci resolve's color page if you're interested in taking a look for yourself there's a link in the description if you already knew about proxies you can also use external programs to do all of your transcoding uh you could use handbrake whatever it may be or if you have some type of ingest system that you know is copying your cards and then also making proxy files for you you have that as well um you could use that there are a couple of caveats to make sure of when you're doing that the first one being that the file names have to be the same the second one is that the uh frame rate has to be the same if those two are the same you could bring them in and link them and it's pretty simple actually let me show you how you would do that so you already have all of your media already transcoded for the people that already know the proxy workflow all you're going to do is just bring in all of the source material all the raw stuff into your project and they're gonna highlight it all you're gonna right click and you're just gonna go link proxy it's gonna pop up a window ask you where is it right so you go to that folder that it's in and it'll link all the stuff that you had highlighted and all the stuff that's in that folder so that's how you would do that um for everyone else that doesn't you know have some type of ingest system or anything like that you want to do it all through davinci resolve um i mean you could use davinci resolve's media page as an ingest because it does have the clone tool and you can do your checksums and all that stuff but let's go into how we would actually set this up so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to want to set up our project right so we're gonna come over here down to the gear and we're gonna click into our little gear here in here we're gonna come into our master settings and then scroll all the way down until we get down to here for our proxy resolution and proxy format so the big thing with uh high resolution uh media is that obviously the files are bigger the data rate's bigger right if we can reduce that then it's going to be less of a workload on our system fetching the file and then sending that to the memory and then through the processor and then to the graphics card and everything else right because at the end of the day we want this workload to be as low as possible so when we start to add in all of our edits all of our transitions all of our effects all that stuff we have some extra processing power and it's not all being processed by these really high resolution video clips that we don't really need while we're editing deliver different story but while we're editing we don't need all that so you can bring this down as low as you want for now i'm just going to go to a quarter so it doesn't matter whatever your resolution is it'll just cut that by a factor of whatever you put in there next is format if you're on mac windows and linux you're going to have a different list here this is where a lot of people get confused you want to come down to a codec that is lighter right so your standard quality high quality and then low bit rate so i'm going to go for this one i'm just going to go for low you're going to want to pick whatever your lower end is that is going to be most suitable for you right if you go too low and let's say you're on a really big monitor and it looks a little too bad well then you want to bump it up a little bit to something that is going to look a bit better for you right you don't want it to be too small where you can't see the detail but you also don't need to see every hair strand we're trying to make our computer as snappy as possible in this process so once we have that set up and by all means we can always change these settings and remake the proxy media if we want to next we're going to scroll down a little bit further and then we have the proxy generation location this is typically going to be a spot that you're going to have a faster drive on right we're trying to lower this workload and get a snappy as snappy as possible so this location always has to be accessible by your davinci resolve it can't be a thumb drive that you pull out halfway through and edit obviously it's not gonna work um but you want it to be something that is going to have enough storage space for all of your proxy files and it's going to be quick and you know so you're you uh your mileage may vary on on your location there but typically i would say pick something in your system unless you have the infrastructure to do it on a on a network drive and the network drives are fast enough um so yeah you can pick that location once you have that all picked we're then going to hit save and now we just kind of set up some settings now we have to pick all the media that we actually want to turn into a proxy file so we can do this from any page i believe but you're just going to highlight all of your media obviously for this project i only brought in one piece we're going to right click or highlight it all right click and then come up here to generate proxy media once we do that it's going to in the background take that file it's going to transcode it into whatever our settings were and then it's going to link which is something that we're not really going to see here but it's going to link that media so now if i was to view this it doesn't look bad right now this is going to be 1080 on youtube so it i don't know if you're gonna be able to see the difference here but we can turn this off and we can see a slight difference here right so we can turn this on and off and there's a slight difference here don't really know if you're going to be able to notice the difference but there is a slight difference but we're all about the edit page speed so we bring this on and it's just like any other clip that we were ever working on big thing to note is that in playback you want to have this selected use proxy media if available if it's available it will use it and it'll be pulling that proxy media file and playback will be silky smooth and like you can see everything is kind of just soft right compared to if i come back turn that on and we can see it looks a little bit better actually you know what i can zoom in even more here and we could see her hair here whereas if we have it on we can see it looks a little crappier but it doesn't matter because we'd be editing it like this you know what i mean so let's say you have some stuff set up as a proxy now you don't know if the couple pieces of media that you're working with or proxies or not let me show you how you do that so you come up here you right click in your uh it doesn't matter any of these like little uh columns up here and we come down to proxy and we click on proxy and then we can see right here it's showing me that there is a proxy resolution let me actually grab another video clip and throw it in here so when i bring in another video clip this one doesn't have it so it says none right so that one doesn't have a proxy file attached to it i can bring it in you would never notice the difference but that one currently doesn't have a proxy file but this one does and it's showing the resolution so before we were working with a 4.6 k and now we're working with a slightly smaller it's a very weird resolution but i believe we had it set as a quarter so yeah so we have that uh you know smaller resolution looking great now there are a couple of things depending on how comfortable you are with fusion and the color page because now we're going to go over to those pages and because there's a couple of things that i want to quickly gloss over i'll show you so before we were saying that this resolution here is 11 52 by 648 right when we come over into fusion as you can see up here it has that other uh resolution the previous resolution but that doesn't mean that the media that it's currently pulling is the other resolution it maintaining this resolution is very critical for when you're doing compositing work because you're going to be bringing in media in here and you want a pixel by pixel count in your locations to be accurate but in the background this is still the crappy quality video so we're still pulling the crappy quality video but all the nodes in fusion are going to be mapped to whatever the proper resolution is so if we're doing any composite jobs we don't have to be concerned with that so that's something to keep in mind if you ever want to see um uh uh the correct pixels for the media maybe you're doing some type of in-depth tracking and obviously this would be a crappy way to track you could simply just come into here uh uncheck this and it doesn't look like it right now but once you move the playhead it'll uh clear up and it'll actually the next frame that it pulls it'll be pulling the uh the actual uh material from the native file uh same way over on the color page there's a couple of things here remember i initially pulled a b-raw file and if you know anything about raw files we have the ability to come over into the raw settings and change the settings over here if i was to have the proxy set up obviously we've seen some stuff move within our curves and whatnot but i could come into each clip and i could start changing this and one thing that you'll notice is that our shot i can play this through isn't changing if you know what raw files are this makes sense why this isn't working but it's just something to be conscious of uh if you do have a proxies so anytime you come over to the color page you want to turn off the proxies right because you're using a super compressed version of the of the video itself so uh that's one thing that i just wanted to make clear and make sure that you know is that you can still obviously add all this stuff in uh but the big thing to note is that uh you want to just make sure that you switch that over whenever you're starting to color stuff because if you don't you don't have access to everything and your color grade's not going to be as accurate as it should be so once we're done right let's say we don't even do anything in color and we still have our you know blurry uh uh footage here right when we go over to the deliver page and we go to render out this doesn't matter what setting is set doesn't matter what setting set when you deliver it's going to use the source material because obviously that's what you would want it to use why would it use a proxy file when you want to have the highest quality of footage that's just a big thing to to to yeah to note there so you don't have to be super concerned with oh man what are the settings that i have to make sure that you hear so that i get you know the utmost quality that's that's not something that you have to be concerned unless you want the proxy file because you're trying to show off something you can simply come down into the advanced settings and then use proxy media it's something that you then have to check it doesn't matter if this uh use if available that doesn't that doesn't matter when we're delivering it will always use the other media unless you check it to use the proxy media and there's there's reasons on why you would do that quick turnaround you want to show a couple of frames off to someone that sort of deal uh but yeah that's not something that you should be concerned with so i think that kind of concludes everything on using proxy media that i can think of i can't think of anything else it is a just very good way to make a struggling system be a lot more snappier and allow you to actually be creative instead of waiting for a computer to process whatever next graphic or effect that you're adding on um but yeah so that's how you would do that and like i said this is just making the workflow on your or the workload on your computer when dealing with the high resolution media now you can do a bunch of things in fusion that make your computer struggle don't get me wrong on that but this is to make the media less of a workload on your system pretty much it in a nutshell just making your system uh more responsive when playing back the media yeah so that's pretty much it i hope you guys learned something today um my name's jr thank you so much for watching until the next one peace

Channel: JayAreTV

Views: 1,648

Keywords: blackmagic, DaVinci Resolve, resolve, tutorial, how to, DaVinci Resolve 17, Fusion, proxy, proxy media, proxy footage, smooth playback, workflow, guide

Id: nQFkvK7jBiw

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021