Reversed Proxies for Premiere

[peterd97150398]

I will be away from the Netherlands for an extended period of time. This is where I live and where I also have a network of people who film for me. Now, I still handle the editing, and I'd like to proceed in the following manner:

The cameraman who has filmed for me sends me the proxy footage. I edit the footage and send the project file back to the cameraman in the Netherlands. They then link it to the original files.

My question is, how does this work? How can I link the proxy files to the original files when I don't have the original files?"

[Ann Bens]

My question is, how does this work? How can I link the proxy files to the original files when I don't have the original files?"

By @peterd97150398

Short answer: you cannot

[Peru Bob]

You may want to look into Adobe Teams:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/faq/teams.html

[R Neil Haugen]

First, with a multi-user operation like that, you should be using either Adobe's Team Projects setup, or Productions mode. Either work for multiple users, though both take a little bit of acclimatization, as they do function a bit diferently than stand-alone 'single' projects. I'll include links to their actually helpful docs on Productions. (Mostly written by expert user Jarle Leirpoll, they are excellent reads for any Premiere user.)

Second, the proxy workflow is an ancient & revered Tradition in cinema post work. And can work fine, as it has for many shows and films over the last 30 years. Although you may not need to do all the following from a TP or Production mode operation, especially if proxies are made as part of the main TP or Production.

AS LONG AS ... the proxies are all named precisely the same as the media they are created from, except for extension, such as mov or mp4 of course. Follow that, and it can work.

The DP makes identically named proxies, you download them on your rig. Edit. Send him the project or an EDL. He takes that project, unlinks all media, relinks to the original files. And may need to reset the sequence framesize, of course.

It's doable, but as always with professional work with deadlines attached,  test first. Extensively.

And ... in these days of being involved with other users from around the planet, working with something like LucidLink is HUGE! It isn't just a fancy dropbox service, this is designed from the ground up to move packets of video media in exactly the way and order that NLEs need to work with them.

I'm in Oregon, my partner Mo is in Cape Town, SA. Our joint TP projects, and a Production, "live" on Amazon S3 servers in London. I'm all PC, he's ALL Mac ... all the time, thank you! (lol)

Mo calls me via WhatsApp to tell me he's uploading a folder of media he's built for us. Guy's a total Ae wiz among other things. So I go to my O drive, the 'virtual' drive LucidLink creates on each machine, and within seconds, that upper folder appears.

A few more seconds, I start seeing video files in that folder! So I go into Premiere, project panel, Import ... and from that virtual drive, I'm seeing his media appear. So I import them, drag/drop to the timeline, begin playback.

The folder hasn't even finished uploading from Cape Town to London, and I'm getting playback in Premiere!  Seems magical, but it just ... works.

For this to work in real time, you do need above 300Mbps constant down and up times with pretty low latency. Multiple tracks of 8k files well ... that would be problematic. However, if you "pin" a file in the virtual drive, L-L downloads that to a local drive. You still access it from the virtual drive, but L-L knows where it is on your computer, so playback works fine.

[Remote Index]

Hello peter etc.,

There are a number of different ways of working with proxies.

One way is Premiere Pro's "built in" proxy function.

Another way is to generate proxies and edit with them, and then relink to original media later (generally referred to as "conforming" in an "offline / online" workflow). Depending on how you organize yourself, the relinking / conforming stage is somewhere on the scale from almost painless to requiring manual oversight. If the proxy files and the original files have exactly the same name (exactly) then that goes a long way towards making the conform go smoothly. If the proxy files and the original files have different resolutions (ie. they are different sizes), there can be some additional manipulation necessary in the conform to adapt to this change.

That's the general gist of it. I suggest some further research on proxy workflows and some simple tests with short clip to demonstrate to yourself what I've outlined above.

R.