Proxy workflow - interpret footage

Samuel Neff: Tough but fair. You're exactly right.

Fergus, do you guys understand the problem we're having? There's no issue with creating proxies that needs to be fixed. Proxy creation is solid. The issue is that Premiere can't seem to treat the proxies the same as it treats the original media.

Amazing. I'm the original person who posted this "idea" for Premiere Pro over 4 YEARS ago. Realistically, this should have taken 3 months for Adobe to see and fix this in a bug fix update. In fact, this was ignored for so long that I stopped my Adobe subscription and moved to greener pastures. Now Adobe is finally addressing it by...putting duct tape over it, and leaving the original headache entirely in place. All the other comments in the last day are hitting the nail on the head. This is not a solution. "whatever frame rate entered in Interpret Footage will be used by Media Encoder to create proxies" is NOT a solution. Any video editor can (and has) explained this below. Adobe needs to do better, and I'm not waiting around to see if they do. Bye.

It’s great that Adobe attempts to fix this issue but like the others have said it should create the proxies at native frame rate and interpret them as set in the project

This proposed fix is good in as much as it makes the current method of working around the problem a bit easier to do, but it's more like automating the workaround than fixing the issue. What needs to happen is for proxy footage to behave just like regular imported footage whereby you import a clip and make decisions about it while editing, those decisions might include interpreting the playback speed to a particular framerate, they also might include changing that playback speed again, to a different playback speed, (maybe you chose the wrong one by mistake).

Ideally using proxies should be a mostly invisible process after the import stage of a project. You shouldn't really need to think about them, and the only consideration needed for using them once made is whether to turn them on or off. If the fix for this bug was directed towards this end, then interpreting clips with proxies should ultimately be no different to interpreting clips without proxies, there should be one proxy made at native frame rate of the source clip and interpretation should happen to it just as it does a normal clip and can be changed on the fly without the need to re-encode. It's evidently possible as any clip imported in to Premiere can be treated as such and interpreting clips doesn't intrinsically change any of it's constituent frames so I don't understand why there's an issue with marrying two versions of the same clip with the same native frame rate the way a proxy file is tied to it's original clip. Whatever the timecode address of a given frame in a clip, the frame number is unique and unchanging so it shouldn't present a problem when toggling proxies on or off, and again, it's evidently not a problem of Premiere itself somehow working differently to that under the hood because again it works with imported clips when sending them out to grade via XML.

Anyway though, up until now, given the existence of the bug, I have worked around it by importing clips with click and drag, highlighting those that need to be interpreted and adding those to the proxy queue first so I can cancel the process in AME and then interpret the clips in the queue correctly before restarting the queue so the proposed fix would be a slight upgrade by cutting 1 or 2 steps but still entrenches what seems like an unnecessary issue to begin with and all it's associated problems. Wasted opportunity.

I have to agree with the previous post that the proposed fix sadly does not seem suitable. It would be nice to change the behaviour of Premiere/Media Encoder to the expected one.

I add my protest to the other ones: this is not at all the solution has been asked by 200+ people here since 2018. Proxies should just behave like the real files, whatever you apply to them. I would prefer Adobe to take more time to work on the real solution (which is still for me the major problem on Premiere Pro right now) rather than this fake fix which will delay the real fix needed for who know how many more years...

I agree completely with these other posts. This proposed fix sounds like it will create more headaches. Proxies should be a clone of whatever the original source is. Premiere should apply interpret footage settings to the proxy as they’re being applied to the original source.

4 and a half years waiting for this very obvious fix to one of the most used features, and the fix Adobe proposes is one that won’t work properly from the start. Brilliant. That’s what we pay our money for.

Frame count of proxies simply needs to match that of the original clip and then play back at whatever is set in the project. It’s extremely simple.

Crucially this also applies to clips that have been manually duplicated in the project - we need to be able to set different frame rates even if they’re sharing the same proxy.

Hello Fergus, thanks for the update. This is not the fix that is needed at all. Everyone creates proxies while importing footage. THEN we interpret footage only on clips those we need.

Proxies should be created using the same fps of the original footage AND they simply need to change footage according to the "interpret footage" setting.