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Proxies bigger than 4K footage
The .mov proxies I ingested are bigger than the original mp4 clips my 4K Sony AX53 shoots. Is this normal? I saw 100 tutorials and did everything by the book. I used the GoPro Cineform 720 to import (ingest) which is a 3 times smaller frame than the original 4K the camera shoots, yet an mp4 clip of 72 Mb turned into a 132 Mb MOV clip.
I have CC 2017.I must say that I work on a 5 year old Toshiba Qosmio laptop (8 Gb RAM) which, much to my surprise, handled a 45 minute 4K movie with lots of effects without a problem. But now I have to do a 2 hour 4K film which I thought it would struggle with so I decided to go with proxies but… I didn’t expect this effect. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Vasco -
2 Replies
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Hi Vasco,
Video compression schemes work using very complex math to crunch the video down to a very small size, while still trying to maintain quality. This takes a lot of processing power to accomplish, not just for the compression, but also to decompress/play the video. The compressed file needs to be reconstituted into the full video frames on the fly, no small feat! The cameras have specialized hardware chips in them to do it efficiently.
The less-compressed a file is, the easier it plays back. Uncompressed files would play back the easiest, since no decompression is needed, however then you are moving a LOT of data and hard drive speed (and capacity!) become an issue.
Therefore, you want something with mild compression as a compromise, which is easier to decompress, but not too large. So even though HD frames are much smaller than 4K, by using less compression you can still end up with larger files.
What you could do is choose a codec with a lower bitrate. I believe Avid DNxHD has a proxy format that would result in smaller files. Cineform is not really a proxy codec, would call that a high-quality intermediate, thus the larger files.
Proxies don’t have to look really good, as they are just temporary. Look for something that is 8-bit rather than 10-bit, that should help for starts. I’ve never used a proxy workflow myself, but do a lot of reading on these forums.Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Thank you, Jeff!
A very comprehensive explanation.Vasco
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