Premiere CC 2017 proxy workflow is amaaaazing

[HelsinkiZim]

Just now, bigfoot said:

Sorry quite off topic - it was in school for brodcast and tv production

That was some impressive lingo!

Don't apologise, was just having a laugh. You know your stuff, school did you well...

[dbp]

35 minutes ago, Axel said:

I don't want to sound like a wisenheimer, but I predicted the success of an easy proxy workflow in Premiere since the first rumors of it's implementation. Good for all Premiere users. Allow me to remind you of the days when Premiere supported the proprietary Nvidia Mercury Engine. I could (but I won't) dig out some lengthy threads in which proud Premiere owners (you used to buy it) poured scorn on us FCP people. The mark of a professional NLE, they said, is the ability to edit the native codec. Now it's the other way around. "X" lets you skip intermediates because it's so streamlined, you use proxies mainly for multicam. The mark of a smart editor is that he uses everything that let's him work with less problems.

Grandma Adobe abandons one of her last fortresses. What's next? Tracks?

Yep, I will totally cop to the fact that I used to be firmly in the "edit native" camp, and now I've completely done a 180 hahaha. Ultimately I think having the option of both is key. Smaller projects and faster turnarounds would have me stay with the native files. Not to mention, some camera files cut like butter anyway and don't need proxies (BMPCC Pro Res, C300 .mxf being 2 examples)

[toxotis70]

6 hours ago, Zak Forsman said:

This is one advantage that I feel Avid has. Proxy mode is just a selection in a drop down menu. No extra media created, works instantly. When you're ready to export, just turn off proxy mode and export.

yes, i use avid in my work too... but you have to import thew footage in Avid format... and that takes time, a lot of time! Its the same thing... you cant use with native footage.

And AMA is very slow...

[bigfoot]

1 hour ago, HelsinkiZim said:

That was some impressive lingo!

Don't apologise, was just having a laugh. You know your stuff, school did you well...

The school I went for was definitely a great investment - So many different kind of projects in 3 years and so many type of jobs...we would touch pretty much every aspect of it. 

We went from the smallest production of 1-2 per crew to massive setup in a delivery truck full of road cases that we would set up 30 students together and switch job regularly. 

 

Operating a 60 foot long jib in a theater was probably the most stressfull one and cueing 6 cameras/topo/overlays for a live hockey game was such a rush - no time to piss / blink or any sort of distraction - the show MUST go on ! 

 

That cinealta combine with 444 sr recorder for green screen work or those 9 Flame station .... Such expensive tool in the hand of 20 years old kids --- keep calm every body ----  

[fuzzynormal]

I've been using it for half a year now.  I've got a modest 2016 PC and it creates the proxies in no time.  From there, editing just flies.  Smooth and easy.  I make the smallest proxy available in the presets.  

FWIW, my assistant editor, on a 2009 iMac, does off line work via the network using the same proxies.  No problems there either.  Smooth.

 

[Zak Forsman]

3 hours ago, toxotis70 said:

yes, i use avid in my work too... but you have to import thew footage in Avid format... and that takes time, a lot of time! Its the same thing... you cant use with native footage.

And AMA is very slow...

 

 

I'm usually importing ProRes files so the Avid's "fast import" kicks in. Which doesn't take long since it's just rewrapping the files as MXF. Which takes the same amount of time as copying the media to the drive I'd be cutting from anyway. 

[toxotis70]

here, we are talking mostly for footage from DSLR , which are in h.264 format.

Avid cant handle those files , its very slow. You have to convert them in avid format.

 

Prores is VERY easy in FCPX and Premiere...

[mojo43]

Damn, the proxy workflow doesn't work with interpreted footage. After importing all of my footage, I interpret the footage to 23.976 and then create the proxies, but they don't match. They only come in at the native fps. Bug in Premiere I guess...

[JurijTurnsek]

On 12/2/2016 at 5:32 PM, Zak Forsman said:

This is one advantage that I feel Avid has. Proxy mode is just a selection in a drop down menu. No extra media created, works instantly. When you're ready to export, just turn off proxy mode and export.

If a computer would be powerful enough to transcode you source media to a lower quality proxy on the fly, then you wouldn't need proxies at all. And since proxies are used when a computer is not powerful enough, there must be some files stored somewhere where you can't see them (don't fool yourself). Kdenlive for Linux uses a dedicated proxy folder and names the files by the md5sum or some hash value.

[Zak Forsman]

1 hour ago, JurijTurnsek said:

If a computer would be powerful enough to transcode you source media to a lower quality proxy on the fly, then you wouldn't need proxies at all. And since proxies are used when a computer is not powerful enough, there must be some files stored somewhere where you can't see them (don't fool yourself). Kdenlive for Linux uses a dedicated proxy folder and names the files by the md5sum or some hash value.

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avid's proxy mode doesn't register any noticeable use of drive space. there's no transcoding of new media involved. 

 

[Cary Knoop]

3 hours ago, Zak Forsman said:

Avid's proxy mode doesn't register any noticeable use of drive space. there's no transcoding of new media involved. 

 

The statement above does not make any sense. 

If you do not transcode a video file you don't have a proxy for it.

 

[Zak Forsman]

2 hours ago, Cary Knoop said:

The statement above does not make any sense. 

If you do not transcode a video file you don't have a proxy for it.

 

 

 

 

 

Avid's proxy mode doesn't generate new media. It refers to the full res media but gives you the option to present it as a 1/4  or 1/16 resolution. So if you've got 4K DCI footage, you have the option of 2K resolution or lower. If you've got UHD footage, you've got the option of 1080 or lower. Avid has had this for nearly two years.

[Cary Knoop]

9 minutes ago, Zak Forsman said:

Avid's proxy mode doesn't generate new media. It refers to the full res media but gives you the option to present it as a 1/4 size or 1/16 size version of it. So if you've got 4K DCI footage, you have the option of 2K and lower. If you've got UHD footage, you've got the option of 1080 or lower. Avid has had this for nearly two years.

That is not a proxy by any definition, and by the way this option, which is obviously very useful, is also available in Premiere Pro.

 

[Zak Forsman]

I hear ya. In this case, it's not the same as lowering the playback resolution or "video quality" for better performance. Avid has both. Two different things.

[dbp]

10 hours ago, mojo43 said:

Damn, the proxy workflow doesn't work with interpreted footage. After importing all of my footage, I interpret the footage to 23.976 and then create the proxies, but they don't match. They only come in at the native fps. Bug in Premiere I guess...

I discovered this as well. It's a big deal for my work, but luckily, there's a (mildly annoying) workaround! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0evKZXohM7o&t=774s

I'll add one thing that isn't in the video. It's best to have a dummy job first in the queue in media encoder, because you have to stop the queue since it starts automatically. If it stops on a proxy file, then premiere won't be able to find it and you'll have to manually re-attach it. Having a random other render queued first ensures that none of your proxy renders get cut off mid-render. 

[Cary Knoop]

10 hours ago, mojo43 said:

Damn, the proxy workflow doesn't work with interpreted footage. After importing all of my footage, I interpret the footage to 23.976 and then create the proxies, but they don't match. They only come in at the native fps. Bug in Premiere I guess...

May I ask what is the original fps?  Is this a 23.976p source packed in a 59.94i video stream?

 

[mojo43]

12 hours ago, Cary Knoop said:

May I ask what is the original fps?  Is this a 23.976p source packed in a 59.94i video stream?

 

30fps, 59.976fps and 120fps all progressive

 

13 hours ago, dbp said:

I discovered this as well. It's a big deal for my work, but luckily, there's a (mildly annoying) workaround! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0evKZXohM7o&t=774s

I'll add one thing that isn't in the video. It's best to have a dummy job first in the queue in media encoder, because you have to stop the queue since it starts automatically. If it stops on a proxy file, then premiere won't be able to find it and you'll have to manually re-attach it. Having a random other render queued first ensures that none of your proxy renders get cut off mid-render. 

Thanks, I actually saw this video a while back. I am not sure why I forgot. Thanks! Hopefully they will fix it in the next release.

[joema]

16 hours ago, Zak Forsman said:

I hear ya. In this case, it's not the same as lowering the playback resolution or "video quality" for better performance. Avid has both. Two different things.

Avid's "proxy mode" when used with original resolution media is not proxy mode by the normal definition. They are simply using lower-res intermediate render files. You can do that in FCPX by dropping 4k footage into a 1080p timeline. It makes some modest improvement but is not remotely as useful as true proxy mode.

As Axel said, Adobe has long said Premiere is so fast you don't need to transcode -- even at 4k. In fact right now Adobe's Premiere overview video on their web site says that:

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/what-is-premiere-pro-cc.html?set=premiere-pro--get-started--overview

"....allows editors to work with 4k and beyond, without time-consuming transcoding....never needing to render until you work is complete"

I used Premiere for years and still use CC occasionally. The Mercury Rendering Engine was revolutionary and it worked great up to 1080p, but it's just not fast enough (without proxy) for native H264 4k on most reasonable machines. E.g,  have a top-spec 2015 imac 27 with a Thunderbolt SSD drive array and it's not fast enough. You might build a custom Windows editing machine that would work, but that's not what Adobe meant in the above statement.

It was inevitable Adobe would have to add proxy support, and it works really well. If any Premiere CC users have not tried this, please do so.

FCPX is a lot faster on the same hardware but even FCPX is not fast enough to handle large amounts of H264 4k without proxy, at least on a top-spec iMac. So in both cases you often need to generate proxy files. FCPX generates them considerably faster than Premiere but that's not a big deal since it's typically an unattended batch operation.

[Axel]

58 minutes ago, joema said:

As Axel said, Adobe has long said Premiere is so fast you don't need to transcode -- even at 4k. In fact right now Adobe's Premiere overview video on their web site says that:

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/what-is-premiere-pro-cc.html?set=premiere-pro--get-started--overview

"....allows editors to work with 4k and beyond, without time-consuming transcoding....never needing to render until you work is complete"

Last year I made the point that Adobe was almost ashamed to advertise their really, really good Lumetri. I sensed a similar hesitation about proxies in Adobes NAB 2016 announcement:

Quote

This release of Premiere Pro also brings support for more native formats than ever including 6K and 8K files from the RED Weapon camera. For times when the media you need to work with is heavier than your system can manage – for example, when you want to work on a lightweight portable device – you can now generate proxies on ingest, automatically associating them with the native full-resolution media. A single click lets you toggle between full-res and proxy.

Like when you are sitting in a Greyhound bus with your Lenovo thinkpad and have to edit some hours of 8k footage. You might think, hey, this stuff runs somewhat lagging today, should toggle proxy ...

Note also how the paragraph starts with native RED in 6k and 8k and how the proxy workflow becomes a subclause, not a HEADLINE, bracketed again by full resolution media.

Very funny.

 

[Don Kotlos]

46 minutes ago, joema said:

You might build a custom Windows editing machine that would work, but that's not what Adobe meant in the above statement.

Yep, thats what I found the hard way. To their credit, I believe they offer the widest codec support but even if you don't have to transcode you are better off doing it when dealing with non optimized codecs.  

46 minutes ago, joema said:

It was inevitable Adobe would have to add proxy support, and it works really well. If any Premiere CC users have not tried this, please do so.

Yes! Proxy support (ingest) made editing butter smooth with literally no extra effort. For 4K XAVC-S to cineform 720p my 8core machine does it in 5X in the background while I am editing so not bad at all.