mixing original and proxy footage

[Oliver Peters]

It’s one or the other. The Proxy workflow is a toggle pointing the clips within FCPX to one set of media (original/optimized) or the other.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Michael Hancock]

[Greg Ball] “How can I work with both types of footage in one timeline?
“

You can’t. This is an unfortunate oversight on Apple’s part, IMO.

You could optimize the 4K footage instead of making proxy files. They would be a lot larger, but should play back pretty well and would get around the issue of not being able to mix proxy with non-proxy.

[Greg Ball] “Also how can I transcode all of the 4K clips at one time to Proxy files?”

Select all the 4K clips, right click, choose Transcode, tick the Proxy box and hit Ok (I’m going of memory here, but that’s basically it). If you choose to optimize the media instead of making proxy files, it’s the same process.

—————-
Michael Hancock
Editor

[Greg Ball]

Thanks so much Oliver and Michael. So if I have 6 minutes of regular interview footage and 3 minutes of 4K Broll footage, do I just edit the entire project as a proxy video project? If so, can I just highlight all of the clips in the project and transcode them to proxy without having to do that in the browser? All of the interview clips are also ready razor bladed and laid out perfectly.

Michael, won’t optimizing the clips slow down playback?

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

[Greg Ball] ” So if I have 6 minutes of regular interview footage and 3 minutes of 4K Broll footage, do I just edit the entire project as a proxy video project?”

That’s probably what I would do. FCPX’s proxy workflow is pretty easy and relatively fast.

[Greg Ball] ” If so, can I just highlight all of the clips in the project and transcode them to proxy without having to do that in the browser?”

I’m not sure if you can create proxy clips in the project, but if you create proxies in the browser they will be linked to your project, so it won’t matter that you’ve already started editing.

[Greg Ball] “Michael, won’t optimizing the clips slow down playback?”

It depends on your hard drives, likely. Optimizing the drone footage will transcode it from it’s original codec (likely h264, which is why it’s about impossible to play back) to ProRes. ProRes should playback much, much better than the original drone footage.

I’ve worked with a ton of drone footage and I always optimize it or make proxies. It’s not worth the hassle trying to edit with the original footage.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Joe Marler]

[Greg Ball] “if I have 6 minutes of regular interview footage and 3 minutes of 4K Broll footage, do I just edit the entire project as a proxy video project? If so, can I just highlight all of the clips in the project and transcode them to proxy without having to do that in the browser? All of the interview clips are also ready razor bladed and laid out perfectly.”

For mixed 1080p/4k material proxy is 1/2 the linear resolution and 1/4 the pixel resolution. Since FCPX proxies are ProRes 422 this equates to about 50% of the original H264 size. For optimized media it’s about 6x the original H264 size. The tradeoffs include size of generated media, I/O rate for optimized media and display resolution.

You can create proxies for everything, but with 1080p this is 960 x 540. That is usually enough for editing decisions but can be a little coarse. Proxy of 4k is 1080p (1920 x 1080) so that’s sufficient in almost all cases.

The issue with mixed 1080p/4k media is FCPX has a single global proxy/regular switch, so it can’t display proxies for 4k and orig. media for 1080p. It’s all or nothing, forcing you to either (1) Accept 960 x 540 for 1080p proxies or (2) Generated optimized media for everything which is about 6x the size and I/O load.