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FCPX, Red and Proxy
First time with 4K footage. My delivery is 1080p, so 4K is overkill, but it’s the footage I was handed. Since I have a 4 year old MBP, I quickly discovered that transcoding 3.5 hours of red footage to 1080 prores would take about a week and probably burn up my dual core MBP, but I could create proxy footage in an evening or two.
I’d like to edit using proxy footage on my laptop, keeping the original RED material on my external 2tb.
My original footage is stored in a managed library folder. I already spent about 12 hours creating the proxy footage, but I did it on the 2tb external. I see that Mark Spencer has a way to store the proxies on a separate drive from the media, but I’ve already created the proxy footage and I’m not keen on spending another 12 hours to recreate it on my internal drive.
Here’s what I tried: I had FCPX copy the event to a new library on my internal drive. Since the media is stored outside the library, all I got was pointers in my fcpx bundle, for the original media as well as the proxy files.
Closing FCPX, I then opened the fcpx bundle on my internal laptop drive using “show contents” in finder, and found the folder with the pointers to the proxies on the external drive. I copied the 67gb of already created proxy files into this folder inside my fcpx bundle. The files had the same name as the pointers, so I had to select “yes” to replace in the dialogue box.
A few minutes later, and now it looks like I can edit my proxies on my laptop with my external drive disconnected. Switching out of proxy mode, and all the media is offline. I connect my external drive, and they are now all back online.
I have audio files to sync up. I think I need to keep these on my local drive, stored in a folder outside the library bundle.
Am I setting myself up for failure here? Any land mines I need to watch out for with this workflow?
I seem to be stuck with my proxies inside the library now, but I can live with that. (I generally like to manage my own media files)
Seems convoluted, but it worked. I feel like if I lose my link to the proxy files, I’m sunk since there’s no way to reconnect them.
Is there a better workflow for me?
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2 Replies
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Even with an old Uni MBP from 2008 we were able to keep FCPX at R3D level.
But your workflow is pretty close to mine.
However with the R3D proxies, why do you need to trick the Event?
Ive done this before and OFFLINED the R3Ds then switch off proxies to link back to original R3Ds.
Unless I misunderstood your workflow.Just wanted to add this:
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Hi – I am more of a beginner with all of this but have a short film done on a Scarlet with RD3 files. I have a MBP from 2010 (8GB or RAM) and when I import these files and transcode them to proxy media they play jerkily. They are still at 380 x 2160 in the Inspector – I think what I need is 1920 X 1080 files in Pro Res 422 format which I can then have in a Proxy Media version in order to do a rough edit. I have downloaded Red’s REDCINE-X PRO to do this transcoding but it seems to want to convert things to Quick Time versions, which FCPX (for some reason) doesn’t want to import. Am now stuck and asking around, so ant help would be appreciated!
Hamish
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