4k 6k 8k and even 12k cameras are all the rage but what if you take that footage you throw in
your system over there your computer to edit with and you have choppy playback
well that's where you're going to be glad you found this video today because i'm going
to show you how easy it can be to start editing video faster and smoother on any computer using
davinci resolve 17 and a technique that's as old as computer-based video editing itself
let's dive in and learn all about proxy media and offline editing plus a few other great little
tips and tricks i'm going to show you towards the end so make sure you stick around let's get into
it we're over here in davinci resolve 17 i've got footage from a canon r5 c200 gh5 sony a73
and to show you quickly what we we're working with on the canon r5 we've got in the inspector you can
see this is h.265 422 footage and it fits a lot of stuff into a small container which is great that's
one thing that's awesome about h.265 bad thing it's super hard on computers to play back and to
prove that over here in the edit page and i'm kind of moving around my my playhead and you see it
takes forever for the um the viewer to update if i hit play okay i've hit play and it took over two
seconds for the playhead even to start thinking about playing back if you look up here it's
telling us about 17 frames a second which i think is generous i think it's actually less than that
one thing you can always try and it's been around for a long time if you do have a faster ish
computer is you can go to playback timeline proxy mode and choose something like quarter resolution
what this will do is it'll dynamically the playback engine of resolve is going to drop
the resolution while it's playing back and it's kind of lying to us here because it is it says
it's playing 23.98 it's it's not really because we can see it's it's just skipping all over the place
and the next thing i want to show you is actually how to create proxy media files which are going
to work great on any system so now to generate proxy media files meaning we're going to actually
create new files we're going to jump down here to the project settings we're going to go to master
settings and then we're going to scroll down until we get to optimize media render cache under here
we're looking at a couple things we've got proxy media resolution and proxy media format we've
got a lot of options here for media resolution you can obviously choose original or make them
smaller based off of these fractions i've actually found that choose automatically is the way to go
if you say choose automatically what that does is it makes your generated proxy files the exact same
resolution as whatever your selected timeline is set to proxy media format you have a lot of
options here too so there's h264 h265 we're gonna send it out over the internet like frame.io or
some sort of digital thing and then we have prores and dnxhr prores are sort of the mac edit friendly
codecs and then dnxhr are like the avid or a pc you can choose any of these they're all going to
work great just know that from the top down it's the highest quality to the lowest quality settings
and because these are proxy files and we're not actually going to finish with them choose the
lower quality one so i've been using prores 422 proxy which makes the smallest file prores file
you can make on here anyways you click prores 422 proxy that's a great one to choose and then and
then you're going to be making prores 422 proxies that are chosen automatically but because i have
a 1080p timeline set up in my master settings up here you can see 1080p it's going to make 1080p
proxies then we're going to look at proxy generation location this is going to just be where
you set the proxy media files are actually going to live so if you click browse it lets you pick a
location on your disk where they're going to be so let's click save and now that we have all of that
set up we're actually going to make some proxy files to do that we are going to jump over to
the media page in the media page here i'm going to close the inspector so we can see a little
bit more there's one more setup thing that you can do if you click this list view we can actually add
columns to see if we have proxy files and where they're located if you right-click anywhere in
this column area and you check the box for proxy and proxy media path what that does is it gives us
another list here to let us know if we have proxy files for those you know for those clips so these
are those r5 clips if i double click i can load them in and it'll tell us the media path where
they're actually stored so these actually have none so let's quickly go ahead and create some
this is what you've been waiting for so the way you do this is in the media pool for some reason
i can't seem to do this in the cut page in the media pool right select them all right click
and then it's as easy as going up and saying generate proxy media here it goes so what resolve
is doing right now is it's taking that h265 stuff that's hard to edit it's making prores proxy as
a completely separate video file that's gonna live in the background speaking of proxy files
what did the raw video say to the misbehaved proxy video you're not out of line you're offline
now that it generated those proxy files we can see under proxy it has resolutions for those proxy
files and because these were dci 4k it brings them to 2048 by 1080. the way we work with them
is you go to playback and you say use proxy media if available you make sure that is checked now
that that's checked we are going to have really a smooth experience working with any of these clips
and we have proxy media path so that's going to show us where they're located so if i jump over to
finder this is the source clip from the r5 it's 285 megabytes here is the prores proxy version
of it and under here we'll see that made a 50.5 megabyte file the original was 285 so it does make
more media but it's significantly smaller so now if we hop back over to that edit page and see this
footage that we were looking at before because we have playback use proxy media if available checked
let's try playing it back look at that we're not missing a single beat it's locked in at 23 976 up
here it's just it's plain buttery smooth and i had already set proxies for some of this other footage
this blue stuff here is c200 footage we can see that's playing fine here's like slow motion
footage from a gh5 that's playing fine but you can kind of see there's a big difference as i just
kind of scrub with my uh my mouse the playhead it's a much different experience it's way less
frustrating every single time it hits across a frame the viewer up here is showing me that frame
if i were to switch back to playback and turn use proxy media off which disables that all of a
sudden it is as stuttery as i'm talking right now it is not good at all real quick i want to call
a timeout and say welcome if you're new here i really appreciate you my name is chadwick this is
creative video tips where i'm helping you create videos that make a difference and stand out that's
the kind of thing you're into click subscribe right down below so you don't miss out on my tip
next week with that out of the way i'm going to get into next about how you can use proxy files
that you created inside your camera while you're recording or maybe a buddy created them outside
in another application you can link those up here and resolve as well so let's check that out
so a lot of cameras can actually record a sub recording format or proxy format in camera at
the same time as your source footage now this is sony a73 footage that i recorded proxy footage in
camera with but i don't have it linked yet so you can see it's kind of jerky and stuttery as
i scrub through the timeline here with my mouse to link them up you just go to your media page
select them all you right click and you can just say link proxy media and underneath here we're
going to go back and i'll show you this right here in camera proxy this is what a camera card
structure looks like off of the sony camera and if i click on m4 root clip these are the these
are the big files and under sub these are actually the proxy files that created in the camera so i
didn't have to do anything extra on the computer to make these so see click sub click open and boom
also and we see we have 720p proxy media files ready to work with we jump back to the edit page
and we have buttery smooth playback because what we're actually looking at here is those
proxy files those low-res versions that the camera had made and we control that underneath playback
use proxy media if available just make sure that is checked now if someone had made proxy files
on another system you would basically do the same workflow you would select all your clips
in the media page you would right click and say link proxy media and you would point it to where
those proxy media files are located at so i know for this instance i have proxy media is already
created for for these clips and i'll just click into the folder where they're all going to be
at i know they're in this folder here so i'll click open and it matches them up so if you're
making proxies in another program you want to make sure that they have the exact same time
code that they have the same file name that they have the same frame rate and that also that they
are formats their codecs that resolve supports now just a quick disclaimer you want to make sure
you are on davinci resolve 17 because generating proxy media is a new feature they had just added
another big benefit to generating proxy files and using prores proxy as you edit
is actually when you're exporting your rough cuts and you're down to that last minute with your
client and you've got that phone call for that meeting you go to your deliver page here and you
scroll down and you go to advanced settings and there's a check box here called use proxy media
and this is going to actually let you export your video way faster than you would have if
not because if this is not checked and it's not checked by default it's going to use your
original media which is obviously it's harder on the computer to work with so it's going to
take longer for it to export your video so as long as you're not showing them a color
grade or you know some sort of finished work and you're just sort of showing some rough cut stuff
make sure you go over here to deliver page and say use proxy media it's going to give you
you know it'll be a lower quality version of a video but it's going to kick out much faster so
it lets you work down to that last minute which a lot of times we need to be doing
once you're done with your project you might want to save some hard drive space
by deleting the proxy files and there's no way to do it inherently right within the program
so the way you're going to do it is you select them just like we had linked the files before
you're going to right click and you're going to say unlink proxy media
now this didn't actually delete them it just removed them from sort of the memory of resolve
thinking there should be something there because we know where we had saved them at we'll go back
to our finder and you actually have to go into your finder for your proxy clips make sure you're
not going to your source clips go to your you know your proxy so i had proxy media store it into here
and you would just select them and then move to trash and then empty your trash so you have to
kind of delete them the old school manual way so for the bonus tip it's a shorty but really a
goodie it's new in resolve 17 and it's gonna free up a lot of ram to help speed up your system so
most of the time when i'm editing i'm gonna send something to client maybe i'll send version three
um and they're gonna send me notes on version three but i'm gonna keep working so i'm gonna
say duplicate timeline and i'll you know i'll rename this this will be version four
and i'll start working from version four so when i get notes back i'm always referring to version
three that they left my notes on the problem with having a lot of timelines in resolve is it loads
all these into ram all the time the way you can fix this and they just add is if you select them
and then right click you can actually say disable timelines and by doing that they're still here we
can go back to them but to manually load them back in you would have to right click it and say enable
timeline to work on it again so if you disable the timeline in this instance right now i've only got
two timelines that are loaded into ram the system is going to have a lot more ram to work with and
just speed things up so now you have no excuse but to edit great video using the computer you already
have if you got something out of this video make sure to give it a like and if you want to learn
more about DaVinci Resolve editing faster smoother there's a playlist that's popping up right over
here i've got so many tricks and tips to teach you so i'll see you over in that next video