Replacing 1080p Proxies with UltraHD 4K Clips – KEEPING ALL MY EFFECTS INTACT

[David Roth weiss]

[Sam Graff] “I’m scared that once I replace my proxies with them, my entire project will get extremely screwed up. (I’ve also considered reconverting all my 4k UltraHD files to much higher quality 1080p ProRes422(HQ) or 4444 files, and swapping out my proxies for those new files, but obviously I’d rather not do that if I can help it.”

Sam,

It seems you’ve already figured out that creating graphics, FX, and making moves on 1080 proxies is going to be a BIG problem. And yes, it’s going to be a %$#@ing nightmare. Absolutely do make 4K proxies, it’s the ONLY way to preserve all of your precise graphics, scaling, re-positioning, and animation.

The best rule of thumb whenever doing offline/online workflows is: always use the same pixel dimensions and frame rate whenever possible, or you will be in for a world of hurt.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Shane Ross]

How did you create those proxies? Offline/Online in Premiere isn’t as strong as it should be…it’s not it’s core function. It’s core function is to work with media natively, full res. Media Management is not it’s strong suit, so relinking might be problematic.

I had issues when I tested this on the first CC version….things might have gotten better, but my test did not go well.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[David Sikes]

I’ve done this before. Three solutions have worked for me in the past:

1) Scale your source footage to 1080. If you’re delivering to 1080, why not? If there are clips you’ve done substantial post-cropping in on, you can manually replace those clips with the 4k source material and just scale to taste.

2) Duplicate the sequence and change its settings to match the scale of your UHD footage. Make manual adjustments to effects and titles as necessary.

3) Replace everything. Select all your clips and use either Set to Frame Size or Scale to Frame Size. Not sure which one is better in this context.

No matter what, Premiere sucks at offline/online. It’s intended to work with footage natively. But there are times when that’s not ideal and you have to go through all of this. I wish they would develop a proper proxy workflow.

[David Sikes]

[Sam Graff] “(Lots of my shots have been scaled to new sizes. I have key-framed matted layers that track with movement, scaled layers, warp stabilized shots, etc…) “

Sorry, I missed that. Ignore my first recommendation.

Set To Frame Size might just be your best friend in this context. When I’ve done this, and had to reconnect 4K footage in a 1080 timeline, it was for me. It’s even a hotkey for me.

[Henry Dalton]

Just replying to this in case anyone is having the same problem as me in the future and ended up finding this thread while searching for a solution:

So I had a similar problem, in that I was supplied with 1080p footage/rushes, and had gone a long way with editing a multicam timeline with keyframed motion/framing changes etc, only to then be told that there was 4k footage after all, and that the footage I’d been working with had been downscaled.

So – create a 4k timeline and copy the 1080p timeline over, offline the 1080p clips, then relink them to the identical (except for resolution) 4k clips. Should work, right? Wrong. Premiere went absolutely crazy, not just not replicating the various keyframes and motion effects, but messing up the 4k clips themselves, cutting off tops, bottoms of them, all sorts.

The solution? Premiere seems to have a bug where it CAN’T RELINK TO OTHER RESOLUTION CLIPS IF THEY’RE IN MULTI-CAMERA, and keep the scaling/framing/effects intact. As soon as I selected all the clips, right clicked and set Multi cam to ‘flatten’, and then repeated the process (making clips offline, then linking to the alternate 4k footage) – worked great.

Hope this saves someone a headache in the future! 🙂