• Adobe After Effects

  proxy workflow help

  Posted by Andy Engelkemier on March 9, 2022 at 4:40 pm

  I understand that everyone’s workflow is going to be different based on what type of footage they are using, what kind of storage limitations they have, and what kind of team they might work in. From what I’ve found, most tutorials are showing how to just convert one piece of footage to a proxy, and move on. That just doesn’t seem efficient to me.

  I sometimes work remote, AND as part of a team, but using full size footage on something like OneDrive for sharing Suuuuucks. So I’m looking to change up our workflow, using proxies.

  First I want to ask if there is a magical way of using AME to define proxies for footage so that when either is brought in to either AE or PrP it just works? I’m assuming no, or I would have found it, but I wanted to ask in case there was a way to get that to work. I’m not sure why that couldn’t just be inserted right into the metadata of the files, or in an XML style file that sits next to the footage for files that don’t allow for metadata changes after they are written.

  So all of the full size footage will be on our server, because it is backed up and has storage available, but ethernet isn’t the Best for editing. For each project I would either create a watch folder, or just render out proxies of everything all at once and move those to my local project folder on OneDrive that gets shared with my team so we are all in sync remotely and locally.

  Then I’d open up premiere (because AE sucks at a decent workflow with proxies) and drag in all of the main footage to a project. Select all of it, right click and attach proxies. Attach one of them to the local proxy and it attaches all of them. Might as well save the premiere project at this point, just in case I do some editing there later.

  Copy the files from the bin, and paste them into AE. And that’s how I’m attaching ALL of the proxy footage at the same time in AE….just do it in PrP? So now I can go home and work without needing the full resolution files, and when I want to go and render I either need to just do the preview with proxies, or be in the office so it will pull the full quality files.

  I could always throw temporary copies of those full quality files on an external hard drive in case I need to render while remote also. And just find the footage there, then not plug it in back in the office so it gets remapped to a shared location for coworkers.

  So that’s what I’m thinking. Is there anything that would make that better, or that I’m completely missing? It seems like AE sucks for using proxies because you can only define one at a time, you can only have them created automatically in AE if you use the Built-in render rather than AME, and there’s not even buttons for automatically turning them on/off. At least AE shows you a button on the footage if a proxy is available/in-use. In Premiere I have to add columns to show the proxy paths to find out if a proxy is available for using?

  Any help or advice on that workflow is appreciated.

  Andy Engelkemier replied 4 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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