Hi everybody, Mark Wallace here for AdoramaTV. Today I want to talk to you
about a new feature in Adobe Premiere CC that just came out. It was just released a
couple of weeks ago and when I saw this I was blown away because it's going to
revolutionize the way that people like me who are editing on lower end machines
and laptops, edit video, specifically 4K.
I don't know if you've noticed but we're living in a 4k world. Youtube now has 4k
capabilities, GoPros are shooting in 4k most consumer cameras now can shoot all
the way up to 4k consumer televisions are 4k.
We are headed that way. 4k is on us and we need to be able to edit 4k.
The problem with editing in 4K video, because those file sizes are so large,
two things have happened. One, they take up our hard drive, but most importantly
when we're trying to edit on a laptop or some other low end machine, not even a
low in machine, this is a high-end macbook pro but it's a 13-inch macbook, it
just can't keep up with 4k files. They're too big, and so Adobe Premiere Pro now has
something that is really amazing. It's automatic and it's the ability to ingest
videos and create proxy files. Now what the heck are proxy files? Well, the bottom line
is they let us edit 4k on lower-end machines.
That's really what you need to know, but a proxy file is if you take a large 4k
video, it's a large file here and it's very difficult for a computer to play
those files because we just don't have the processing power to do that,
specifically when we're trying to edit video and adding effects and stuff. Well proxy file
takes that big file, it creates a smaller version of that, a very lightweight
version of that, lower resolution and then we can take that and we can edit using
those small files and add all of our effects and everything. It will play just
fine on our laptops or normal iMacs or computers, whatever we have, we can edit
just fine really, really quickly and then we're done and everything is finished
and it looks great on our screen, we can say all right ,we want to make the final
product and then
then Adobe Premiere Pro will take those original 4K files and use those
for the final output, so you get that 4k final output and maybe you're not even
trying to do 4k final output but editing and shooting in 4k can be a huge benefit because
you have a large resolution, a large file size and then you can pan and zoom and
do all kinds of things with that larger resolution and sort of crop out the
details that you don't use and you're not losing any resolution so there's a
lot of reasons to shoot and edit in 4k. But until now it's been a pain.
So here is how it works. Now, so, a few months ago I was in the United States
and I went to the dog park with my friend Norm Beer, and my dogs and I shot
some 4k video of Cody and Tosca running around with all their pals at the dog
park and so those are all shot in 4k on my Panasonic Lumix FC 1000 so I have
those here in Adobe Premiere Pro and I'm looking at these through my media
browser. This window looks unfamiliar to you. I am in the assembly work space so
you get the windows workspace assembly and then I just drag out this left-hand
panel here for my media browser and then made sure I was looking at thumbnails
instead of a list view.
So that's what I'm looking at right now. So, the issue with these large 4k files,
so here's one of Tosca and a friend at the dog park.
If I play that the first few frames are going to play just fine and then oh my
Oh can't keep up the computer is melting.
So it just won't keep up with what you're trying to do and what we need to
do is, instead, create a proxy file so that we can have this play along just
fine.
How do we do that? It's really easy and it's automatic.
That's the nice thing, now. It's automatic in Adobe Premiere Pro.
How do we turn that automatic feature on? It's very simple. In the upper left hand
corner of the media browser, you will now see this little box here that says
ingest and then there's a wrench
next to that. So I'm going to click on the wrench and that is going to open my
ingest settings.
Now these are also in the project settings so you'll see there's the
general, the scratch disk and ingest setting so if you don't want to get
there to the wrench,
you can always go to the preferences and you can go to your project settings, I'm
sorry, not preferences, but your file-project settings-ingest settings. So you
can get there that way and also when you're creating a project,
these ingest settings will pop up from the very beginning.
So what we're going to do here is we're going to turn on ingest.
Now that we have that, we have some options.
Copy, transcode, create proxy and create and copy, or copy and create proxies.
So really, what we want to do is when we ingest, when we import those files,
what's happening? The first one here, copy, takes the original file from whatever
location it is on a hard drive and copy it to a new location,
we don't want to just do that, transcode, takes it from one file format maybe
H.264 and transcodes it to something like a quick time or some other codec.
iIt's not really what we're wanting to do here. These are the two things that we
want to do. So one is create proxy and that just says, 'hey take that 4k file,
create a new file,
a proxy file and then save that somewhere'. The second, here, is take that 4k file,
copy it to a new location and also create a proxy.
I don't want to copy and create. For this I just want to create my proxies.
That's going to ask me, which kind of proxy.
If you don't know what these different resolutions are I suggest you choose
this, the 1280 x 720. That's a 720p apple pro res 422 proxy.
I don't have enough time to go into all those settings but that's the one you should
choose if you're just starting out. Then the other thing that we are going to be
asked here is where do you want to put these proxy files.
So we can use a preset destination so maybe you have an external hard drive
that has nothing but proxy files, you could throw those into the cloud, or you can
keep them in the same project. You can put them anywhere you want. For me, right now,
I'm just going to keep them in the same folder as my project.
Once you have that, you say okay, now. How do we make all this stuff happen?
This can't be any simpler so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to
highlight
all of these files here and then I'm going to right click on these and I'm
going to say import and so now I have all of my files imported into my project
and behind the scenes now
Adobe Premiere Pro is already starting to ingest these and you can see that
what I did here is I just zipped over to Adobe Media Encoder. That was
automatically launched.
I didn't have to do anything. That automatically was launched and now
all these files are being created and so that is going to happen in the
background, so you don't have to do anything.
You don't have to look at that, you don't have to go to Adobe Media Encoder, you don't have to do
anything, it just happens.
But if you want to see what's going on, you can, so what you need to do next is
you need to wait for these files to finish encoding. Now, depending on the
speed of your computer, that could take a while.
That's the whole point of creating proxy files, you're taking all that processing,
doing it in advance and then you're creating these small files, so what we're
going to do now is we're going to wait for all of these files to finish being
created and then we're going to go back in and I'm going to show you how you can
use them and how quick it is to edit these. With the magic of editing, all of
that is done. If I go over here to Adobe Media Encoder, you can see that all of
these proxy files have already been created. That took about 20 or 30 minutes
for that to happen, but it all happens in the background and you don't have to
wait for that actually, you can keep editing
if you want and it'll just keep creating those proxy files as you edit and so as
the first proxy files come in,
you don't really have to wait for everything to finish to start editing
your project or you can if you want to, if you want to get a cup of coffee.
I want to show you something that's going on here. So in my project file, and I
expand that by hitting the Tilde key and then I'm going to add, on my metadata
display, a field.
So I just type in proxy here and add that, just so you can sort of see what's
happening. When I zoom in here you can see that on all these files there is a
proxy attached. If there isn't, you'll see that it's not attached and so that way,
if forever you need to detach your main files and just work on the proxies for
example if you're working on a laptop and you don't want to bring a giant raid
with you or external hard drives, you can just use those small proxies and later
on you can reattach the proxy files. It's really sort of cool and to do that,
you just right click on your file and then you'll go down to proxy and you'll
see that you can do one of three things, you can create the proxies,
so if you haven't, if you forgot to click that ingest tab or something, you can create
proxy this way.
Create the proxies or if they've become detached, you can attach those and then
if you're only working with the proxies and you want to attach the full
resolution media, you do that there so it's just a right click on your file
name and you'll get into that and so that's how that works.
It's really cool. Alright, let's go over here to the editing... the normal
editing window here and what we need to do is we need to be able to turn on and
off the editing with the proxy or editing with the full resolution video.
Now this is extremely easy, so the first thing we need to do here is we need to
go over here to this little button editor, that's this little + sign
right here and if you click on that, what you'll get is this little pop up here
that shows you the available buttons for your little menu and there's this new
one right here called toggle proxies, you want to drag that down and make sure
that it shows up there and then hit ok and once that's there, it's just going to
show up right here. If you click that and it's blue,
that means that you're editing with the proxies. If you click it again and it's
white, it means you're editing with your full resolution video.
Let me show you the difference between these two things. So here is a little
clip here. I am editing with the full resolution video. You can see when I
scrub, through this
I'm not really getting a real-time scrub. If I start playing this, there's my friend Norm
who is the dogfather, as they call him, of my dogs now.
You see this is not playing back in real time.
It's just clunky but if I just click and say hey I want to see the proxy files
and then I hit play,
check that out. Now it's playing and it has no issues. I can scrub through that, I
can go back and
forth. I can do all kinds of things and it's going to work just fine and now I can
just edit with this window and it's going to work just fine so now as I'm
going through here.
I can take this, I'll mark an end point. I'll zip over here all mark an out point and then I'll
just take that. I'll throw it down on my project and now, all of this stuff,
what we're seeing here are the proxies and so as I'm playing through my
timeline, everything I'm doing this is a proxy file that is being used and so any
of these little clips here,
these are all proxy files that I'm going to be seeing and and working with and so
if you see this right here, this media pending sometimes it takes a couple of
seconds for those proxy files to attach or render but they'll come in just fine.
Don't worry about it. Just like that. Now, we have this shot here of Cody and then
we can just go ahead and edit all of this stuff.
Now, remember, when you're done with your video and you want to throw this out and
you go to your export or to throw that over to Adobe Media Encoder,
it's going to always use the high resolution files, always, so you don't have to
worry about turning on and off that proxy little button there.
So if you turn that on and then you edit your entire video using the proxy files
and then you forget to unclick it and your render out 4k, you're going to
get 4k.
You're always going to get that high resolution file that you originally
started with. Your not going to render out with the proxy files so you don't have to
worry about remembering anything. That's all there is to it.
Click the ingest button, make sure you choose the right settings, add that
little button, turn it on,
edit to your heart's content and now you're editing in 4k on a laptop in
real time without all the delays and lags and all the stuff that you've
experienced in the past by editing those huge files.
Well, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of 'Exploring
Photography'. I think these proxy files and all the automation that comes with
it is going to change the way editors like me
edit 4k video and in other words, we're going to be able to do it now and
I think that's worth the upgrade, so check that out.
Thank you so much again for joining me. Don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV
for more tips and tricks about photography and
video and shooting and lighting and all of that stuff. It's absolutely free so
check that out.
Make sure you visit the Adorama Learning Center and I will see you again next week.