- We've all been there
at one point or another, you're in the middle of
an edit in Premiere Pro and your computer starts getting laggy and it's having trouble
scrubbing through footage and you're dropping frames on playback and you just wish it could work so that you could finish your edit. What if I told you that there was a way to improve the speed and
stability of Premiere Pro while you're editing? Oh yes, I will tell you that. (upbeat music) (camera shutter clicking) What is up, people? Dunna here, and today, we're gonna talk about something in Premiere
Pro called proxies. Now, this is gonna be super handy for people with older computers that can't handle things
like 4K video files, or even if you have a newer
computer but it's a Mac and it's not quite as optimized to run really nice with Premiere Pro, this is gonna be helpful for you too. For example, I have the 2017 MacBook Pro and it's pretty specced out. It has the separate GPU and everything but it still just doesn't work
as smoothly with Premiere Pro as I would like it to. When I'm working with my 4K
footage from my Sony cameras, it can start to get really
sluggish in the edit and I can't scrub through very well. It doesn't playback smoothly and sometimes it even can
kind of freeze up on me. In a nutshell, a proxy is a
version of your video file that's easier for Premiere Pro to read. The compressed files
that come out of our DSLR and mirrorless cameras
have to be uncompressed in order for Premiere Pro
to use them in the timeline and it's trying to do
all that work on the fly which makes it really
hard on your computer. So, what you could do is
you could convert that file into a different type of file
and just use those files. That's called transcoding, but those files can be
really, really large and take up a lot of
space on your hard drives. Alternatively, proxies are
typically smaller files. For example, if you're using 4K footage, you can make 720p proxies and you use those just
in the editing process. And if you do it right, those proxies also can
be the same type of file that Premiere Pro can read easier. So for example, I've got a
couple of 4K clips on my timeline that came out of my Sony a7 III and when I try and scrub through, you can see Premiere
isn't keeping up with me. It's a little laggy, and
if I try and play it, you can see all the dropped
frames that are happening there. It looks all choppy and laggy. Sometimes turning down
that playback resolution will help you to get smoother
playback, but I found lately that even if I'm down to
a quarter or an eighth, sometimes that footage
can still be choppy. This is when I wanna make proxies. Now, they've made it super easy to make proxies in Premiere Pro and I'm gonna show you how to do that now. So the first thing we wanna
do is go up to our footage in our project and
highlight all of the footage that we wanna make proxies for. In this case, that's all of it. We're gonna right click and go down to Proxy, Create Proxies. This is gonna bring up a
window that we can then choose what proxy file type we want to make. In this case, our files
are already H.264 files and we wanna use QuickTime
because those are the files that are easier for Premiere Pro to read. Now, under QuickTime, we've got all these options
that we can choose from. Personally, I like to use Apple ProRes but there's also the GoPro CineForm. And then what I've done here at the top is I've made my own preset, and I'll show you how
to do that in a minute, but if we wanted to keep it simple, we could choose the 720p
Apple ProRes 422 Proxy. We're gonna choose to put the files next to the original
media in a proxy folder and then we hit OK. And what's gonna happen is it's
gonna open up Media Encoder and it's gonna start making
those files in the background, but I wanna show you how
to make your own preset for your own proxy types. So, what I'm gonna do on my timeline, I'm going to go up to File, Export, Media. This is gonna bring up
the Export settings. I'm gonna go under Format, I'm
gonna go down to QuickTime, and I'm gonna choose
Apple ProRes 422 Proxy. I'm not gonna worry about
the name or anything. Now under here, you can
see that it's checked, so it's currently matching the file size that my original file is,
I'm gonna uncheck that. And as long as this is linked, I should be able to
change the height to 720. Now we've got our 720 by 1280. Everything else, we can
pretty much just leave as is. Now this is the part that I really like to do with my proxies just so I can remember when I'm working with
proxies and when I'm not. I'm gonna click over to Effects. I'm gonna scroll down until
I get to Name Overlay. Under Prefix, I'm going to type PROXY. I'm gonna change it to
Prefix and Suffix Only. So now it says PROXY there,
turn opacity all the way down so there's no little background thing. I'm gonna put it in the bottom left. Now, instead of hitting Export, 'cause we don't actually wanna
export our media right now, we're going to save this preset and we're just gonna call it 720 PRORES PROXY EXPORT. And then we're gonna cancel 'cause we don't actually
need to do anything there, and we're gonna open up Media Encoder. Now this is where we're gonna
make the actual Ingest Preset. So, there's a difference between an Export Preset
and an Ingest Preset. So, what we just made
was an Export Preset. So if we were going to make
an actual 720 proxy file that we exported off of our timeline, maybe we were gonna send that to somebody to let them check it out or something before we make the final
high quality version, we could use that, but what we need to do is make a new Ingest Preset and this will show up when
we go to make proxies. So, what we're gonna do in Media Encoder, we're gonna go to Create New preset here, Create Ingest Preset, we're gonna name it 720 PRORES PROXY INGEST. Under here, you wanna make sure Transcode Files to
Destination is selected. We're gonna choose QuickTime. And then under here, we should actually get the
export that we just made. And now when we hit OK, it just made us a new Ingest Preset. So now, when we go back to Premiere Pro, we go to our footage, we right
click Proxy, Create Proxies, we're gonna add an Ingest Preset. I'm gonna do a quick search
for 720 PRORES PROXY INGEST. And if you wanna go find this manually instead of searching for it, on a Mac, it's gonna be
under your main thing, Documents, Adobe, Adobe Media Encoder, the version, Presets,
and that's where it is. As of 2019, searching
it is just way easier. We're gonna hit Open. And now, under our QuickTime
with all these other options, we've got 720 PRORES PROXY INGEST. As you can see, I already had one up here. We're gonna hit OK and it's gonna create
proxy jobs in Media Encoder and it's gonna do it in the background. Now you can see that it's
currently creating the proxies and when it's done this, it will automatically attach
them back in Premiere Pro. They have this kind of
smart communication. Now, the biggest problem with proxies is that it takes some time to make, so the best time to do this is when you're first
setting up the project, put all your footage in
there, go to create proxies, and then go do something
else for a little while and let it do its thing. Luckily, like this was a cooking show, I already had some proxies made, so all I have to do is reattach them. And if you happen to
already have proxies made, you can reattach them like this. Go to Proxy, Attach Proxies, and then you can search for them. If you choose Relink others automatically, it should find them for you. There they are, now they're all attached. So now, when I'm looking
at my program monitor, I can turn on proxies using this here. And if you don't see this, you can go to the little Button Editor and you can choose it from in here. So you grab that and
put it down right there. Now that we've got that
button out, we can choose it, and you can see right away, it put proxy in the bottom corner and that's how I know that
I'm looking at the proxy file. Now, when I scrub through, you
can see how responsive it is. It plays back smoothly. You can even crank it
up to full resolution and it still plays back smoothly. It takes a little bit of time
at the start of your project but if you can just let
go, have lunch or something while it's making the proxies, it makes a huge difference
and saves you so much time when you're in the edit. But as always, I wanna hear from you guys. Do you use proxies? Do you have a different
method to get there? Or do you use a cool Ingest Preset? Leave a comment below and
let me know what you think. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)
