Resolve & Colour line · stop 11 of 14 · 20 min · members
Proxies that relink cleanly, keep colour, and do not surprise you at the render.
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Why
Most of an edit is timing, and timing is impossible when playback stutters.
Modern camera files are large and expensive to decode. Cutting directly from them means dropped frames, laggy scrubbing and a machine that heats up — and every one of those makes rhythm judgements harder.
Proxies replace the heavy files with light ones during editing, and switch back to the originals for grading and delivery. Nothing about the edit changes; only what the application is decoding.
The failures people associate with proxies — wrong output resolution, offline media at render, colour differences — all come from the switch back being unreliable, and all of them are avoidable with a consistent setup.
Making them
The pairing depends on names, so names are the whole thing.
Generate proxies at a lower resolution in an edit-friendly codec, keeping the filename identical apart from the extension, in a mirrored folder inside the project.
for f in 01_footage/*.mov; do
ffmpeg -i "$f" -vf scale=1280:-2 -c:v dnxhd_or_prores \
-c:a copy "03_proxies/$(basename "${f%.*}").mov"
doneCopy the audio rather than re-encoding it. Audio is cheap to decode and re-encoding introduces a needless difference between proxy and source.
Keep the frame rate and the timecode identical. A proxy at a different frame rate will drift against its source and the symptom appears at the worst moment.
Resolution
Small enough to be fast, large enough to judge a frame.
Proxies that are too small make focus, framing detail and text unreadable, and you end up switching back constantly, which defeats the purpose.
Around a quarter of the source dimensions is the usual sweet spot — comfortably playable, and still enough to assess whether a shot is sharp.
Match the aspect ratio exactly. Any padding or cropping introduced at proxy generation will show up as a framing difference when you switch back, and it is confusing to diagnose because the edit itself is correct.
Colour
Never judge colour on a proxy, and never bake a look into one.
A proxy in a different codec will not match its source exactly, and a proxy generated with any transform applied will mislead you badly.
Generate them from the source with no colour management applied, and do all grading with proxies switched off. The workflow is: cut on proxies, switch to originals, grade, deliver.
If you must review colour while working light, switch that one clip back rather than trusting the proxy. It takes a second and prevents a grade built on a wrong reference.
The render trap
The most common proxy failure is delivering the proxy.
Rendering while proxy mode is enabled produces a deliverable at proxy quality. The export completes normally, the file plays, and the problem is only obvious if someone looks closely.
Build a check into your delivery routine: switch proxies off explicitly, confirm the source resolution on a clip, then render.
Also confirm no clip is offline at full resolution. Proxies can mask missing originals entirely — the timeline plays perfectly and the render fails or substitutes black.
When to skip them
Generation time and disk space are real costs.
Transcoding a large shoot takes hours and the proxies occupy meaningful space. For a short project on footage your machine handles comfortably, that cost exceeds the benefit.
The test is simple: play the heaviest sequence with a couple of effects applied. If it holds, work from the originals. If it stutters, generate proxies and leave it running overnight.
Generate at ingest where you do use them. Doing it later means interrupting an edit that is already underway, which is when it feels expensive.
1:1 · two hours