Hey. My name is Matt Johnson, and today I'm going to show you how to use
your Sony cameras in camera proxy feature
to take your footage from playing back like this in your editor.
Slow and stuttering because the footage is so high quality
that your computer cannot keep up with it to this incredibly smoothly playing
back footage that you can scrub through like a hot knife, cutting through butter.
And this is a huge deal because by creating proxies in camera
this means that you will never have to
waste time and slow down your workflow, creating proxies in post.
Here's how I do it.
Let's start by talking about how to enable this feature.
If you're on a newer Sony camera, like the A7 s three A7 for a one or
any of the newer cameras that have the newer menu system,
you're going to want to enable this feature
by going to the Red Camera menu and selecting proxies.
Here, you will notice that you have two options.
You can either select x ABC s proxies, which are going to be recorded
at seven type resolution or x ABC H.
S proxies that are going to be recorded in ten step resolution
considering that these are just proxy files though, that you're going to be
using to speed up your editing and you want them to be as fast
as possible, I would not go with x ABC
s and instead choose x ABC s because this is going to offer you
the smallest file size resolution and bit rate
which means the raw footage will playback as smoothly as possible when editing.
Alternatively, now if you have an earlier Sony camera
like the 8738 6600, et cetera, with the older
style of menu, you can still use proxies with these cameras
by navigating to the movie menu and turning proxies on.
You don't have any other settings to change to do this.
Next, we need to talk about which memory card you should use
with the biggest factor being the speed of the memory card.
Because if you don't have a fast enough memory card, you are not going to be able
to use proxies with certain frame rates to save you time.
I've created a mega chart of all of the frame rates and resolutions
and memory card speeds that I've tested,
and that is in a nice little PDF cheat sheet that you can download for free
down in the video description
if you want to figure out
if your memory cards are going to work for making proxies.
To summarize the in-depth cheat sheet, though, I would really recommend
purchasing SD cards that have a speed of at least V 60
because these are going to be the best bang for your buck in terms
of the amount of proxies they support for the price.
If you buy slower v 30 memory cards, they're only going to support
recording proxies in 4K at 24 frames per second.
And while they will support recording in 4K 60, it is only going to be
at a maximum of eight bit, not ten bit.
And considering I know that a lot of filmmakers want to record
with 4K 60 intended this is why I recommend
faster V 60 or V 90 cards.
Lastly, in regards to memory cards, there is one more limitation
that we need to talk about and that is the sad news that
unfortunately it is impossible to create proxies in camera
while recording at 120 frames per second,
either in 4K or even ten ADP.
Even if you buy the fastest memory cards that you can get for your camera,
which for the A-7 S3 and A7 for A-1, et cetera, r c, f express type
A memory cards, the camera will still not allow you
to record proxies in camera while shooting at one piece
I wish it were possible, but if I was to guess,
this looks like more of a heat issue where the camera would be pushed too hard.
If it's trying to record two separate videos both at 120
frames per second, it would probably just melt the camera.
So unfortunately, if you are someone that loves to record at 120 frames per second,
you will instead need to create proxies in post using your editing software.
The good news is that I have a tutorial to show you how to do that
in Adobe Premiere Pro if you want to check it out,
I'll leave that video in the corner and down in the video description.
Now let's shift gears and talk about how to edit
with these proxies that you have recorded in camera.
If you're using Adobe Premiere Pro like me, here's
how to use these proxies in your software and save you a ton of time.
First, you're going to want to connect your memory card to your computer,
and then you're going to want to make sure that you copy the entire file structure
from the memory card.
If you're somebody that usually
just copies
the video files, you're going to be upset because your proxies are not going
to be there.
So I recommend copying everything like I've done here.
Next, open up Premiere Pro and import your full resolution video clips.
I've imported some here onto the timeline too.
For the sake of this example, it's finally time to get those proxies.
So go back to the folder that has all of your footage in it
and go back to the info root folder and go to the sub folder.
And here, look, there's more video clips.
These are all of your proxy video files and you have one more thing to do.
You need to change the title of these video clips.
So Premiere Pro will automatically import them correctly.
If you do not do this step, you're going to need
to manually link every single proxy file that you've recorded
to the native video files.
And this is going to be a huge pain and take you a ton of time
to make these proxies work.
In Premiere, you need to delete these last three characters from the file name.
In this case, this is 03 and you need to replace them
with the text underscore proxy in all caps.
This is how Premiere natively handles proxies.
It will guarantee that your proxies work flawlessly with your full resolution
video files.
Now, of course,
I only have four video clips here, so I could rename them fairly quickly.
But if you have a lot of video clips, say you're filming a wedding and you have
hundreds of video clips, renaming them individually would be a huge pain.
So if you are on Windows, I would recommend that
you use a free piece of software called bulk rename utility to rename your files.
And if you're on Mac, I will link down in the description
to an article showing you how to bulk rename your files and Mac OS.
I'm going to press Control Z now to bring this video title back to match
to all the other video titles so I can use the bulk rename utility.
Going to go down here and open up bulk rename utility ooh.
Check this out.
This looks complicated.
Don't worry, it's actually really easy.
First up here on the left, you're going to want to navigate through this folder
tree down to where your proxy files are kept.
In this case, we got to go down here to M for root, go to sub,
and here are the proxy files.
Then I'm going to press control a to select all of these proxy files.
And we're going to go down here to this remove section
and we're going to say we want to remove the last in, click, click, click.
And then you're going to notice up here that under new name,
you'll see that the last three numbers and letters have been removed.
Then we're going to go over here to add and we're going to go to this suffix
and we're going to type underscore capital pro x y.
And you'll see here that this is what it's saying.
The new name is going to be click rename.
It's going to say, Are you sure? Yes, press.
OK, press. OK, again.
And looking back at this folder, look, we've just renamed all of this text
to now have underscore proxy at the end.
This is going to save you so much time.
Lastly, all you need to do
is go back into Premiere and go back to the project panel.
I'm going to like the first clip. Hold on shift.
It's like the last clip. So they're all selected.
And then I'm going to right click on these clips, go to proxy,
attach proxies that is going to open up this attach proxy dialog box
and then make sure that Relink others automatically is selected click attach.
And that's going to open up
this window here that has all of your native video files.
But we want the proxies.
So let's go down here to the subfolder
and you'll see here it says it wants us to attach proxies to see 3186.
So we're going to select C 3186 underscore proxy press, OK?
And Premiere is going to automatically detect all of the other
proxy files and automatically attach them to the native files.
You can tell to your proxies off and on by using this toggle proxies button.
If you do not see this button though, hit this plus icon over here
and then find the proxies
icon and drag it down to right here and then you can use it.
Press OK, scrub through here.
Here's the native file.
Without the proxies,
you can see how slow this is and then let's turn on the proxies.
Check it out.
Look how smooth that is.
It's like what you want to look at some tree footage.
We got tree footage. It's so smooth. Oh, my gosh.
I love it.
Lastly, I would be aware that whenever you are
ready to color grade your eclipse, I would always recommend
using the full resolution version of your files to do that.
So I would then turn off your proxies whenever you want to color.
Great.
Speaking of color grading, if you want to get incredible colors
with your Sony footage or with any other camera footage
for that matter, I have created a set of color presets called
Who Is Matt Lutz that are guaranteed to get you amazing
looking colors in your videos, regardless of which picture profile you use.
I will link to Who is Matt Lutz down below,
and that's how you use in-camera proxies with your Sony camera.
I really hope this video has been helpful to you and it's going to save you
a ton of time when editing your videos.
Please keep in mind that that proxy file cheat sheet is linked down below.
If you want to save time
and make sure that your memory cards will properly work with your camera.
Lastly, I want to help you out even more with your editing.
So I've created another free guide called Edit Videos Like a pro,
and this guy is going to walk you through some of the most advanced techniques
that I have learned to edit videos that took me years to learn.
So if you are just getting started, or even if you've been filming
and editing videos for a while,
I'm betting there's something in there that will help you.
You can download that guide for free down in the video description
thanks so much for watching and have a great day.