Using heavily-compressed H.264 for proxies

I have had good success with using these presets on my system for H.264 proxies. Where my machine struggles playing back 4K H.264 off my RAID, it does very well with the lower res 720p H.264 proxy files which I can fit on my SSD drive. For me if it works, it works.

The main problem I having is that Premiere wants to make a .cfa audio file for each proxy file, as it does with any file that isn't 48kHz uncompressed audio. Is this normal? Do the cineform and prores proxy encoding settings use wav audio?

Any time you are using an interframe codec such as H.264 versus an intraframe codec such as Cineform or ProRes you are adding an additional workload to your computer.

For example in a 24fps project, Cineform presents 24 unique frames to the computer per second, while H.264 presents 3 packets of 8 frames each. The frames inside the packets are mixed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a carton, designed to minimize the amount of space the puzzle is taking up while in storage - but needing to be reassembled prior to being seen as an actual image.

To play the Cineform the computer just plays the frames one after another, to play the H.264, the computer has load the GOP, reconstruct the individual frames out of each packet, and then display them - continuously.

The apparent operational consequences of choosing one over the other for editing (as opposed to the impact on image quality, recompression artifacts, etc.) are basically a matter of computing horsepower - you need and will use a lot more horsepower to work with interframe codecs.

MtD

Simple scrubbing shows a marked difference for me.