Import media as proxy

[GregoryYoung]

Import media as proxy file.

Often we are sent dailies/proxies (shooting 4k, dailies made at 1080p) which are used to start editing the next day. We do not receive full resolution media to up to a week or so later. It would be beneficial to be able to import the dailies as proxy media so it can mimic the 4k resolution and therefore eliminate the need to resize during the online process and attach the native source media easily.

[paul_lundahl]

Greetings! Like many other folks, we are remote shooting with camera crews and need to quickly get proxies from set that our editors can access quickly and start editing with. A common usecase is the proxies that the Canon C300 MK2 camera generates internally and records to an SD card. The camera originals are 3840x2160 and 400 MBS (23.98 fps, with 4 channels of audio). The proxies are 1920x1080. matching audio channels and framerate and 24 MBS, quite a bit smaller! We want to download these small proxies from set and have Premiere treat them as “attached proxies” even though we don’t have the originals yet. We would like to have the option to have Premiere interpret them as 3840 x 2160 as if they were proxies attached to masters of that framesize. Then later, when the camera crew gets back from location, downloads the originals and uploads them, our editor might download them the next day or even later. But we would like to have the proxy workflow where they point the Premiere project to the camera originals and Premiere recognizes them as the “attached masters” to the proxies they’ve been editing with. Now, when we finish an edit that has been edited with the 1080P proxies, often we’ve done a lot of resizing and reframing in the 1080P sequence and so when we reconnect to the 3840 x 2160 files it’s complicated to go back to resize and reframe. Also, we are wanting to be able to make very tiny 1280 x 720 MP4 proxies on location and have those map back to our raw files. A similar usecase requiring the same features in Premiere. We’ve been able to do this in After Effects since 1999 or so by bringing in offline clips and attaching proxies while waiting for the full rez clips to be available. Maybe this feature could be developed from code that the After Effects team has already developed? This would be an enormous timesaver and we would be very appreciative if you could help us develop this workflow!

[chrisl93857739]

Please Adobe, help us out with this workflow need. It speed up our workflows dramatically. Thanks!

[paul_lundahl]

Also should note that this workflow is especially needed as we start adapting new workflows like Frame.io's camera to cloud. Without this workflow camera to cloud is broken in Premiere as there is a limit of 1920x1080 and stereo audio which will make proxies that can't be attached in Premiere once you have the full resolution, more than 2 audio channel camera files. .

[josh_m_rogers]

This is a huge missing piece for fast turn around workflows. This really needs attention

[emoglen]

I'm biased as I am part of the team making the request, but / and this is a simple but massive missing piece in our workflow. Sure would be a major help!!!

[joshferrara]

+1 for this. Would save a ton of time and allow remote editors get to working sooner without waiting for full res assets.

[Indigo Iris]

+1 to this request! It would be of tremendous help

[wrightjd]

+1 for this! This would be a GAME CHANGING feature that is highly needed in this COVID season. Honestly, it would still apply post-COVID as well as our industry is ever changing, and assets are need quicker than ever.

This would also give Adobe huge marketing points by being able to be frame.io camera to cloud "compatible". This would be very cutting edge of Adobe to do this!

[brookh13738794]

This is an essential feature now, please make it so!

[travisvachon]

Yes please!! With such dramatic disparities in internet connectivity this is really needed for folks who don't have access to the highest bandwidth connections while we're all stuck at home!

[Aaron Rhodes]

Paul is a seasoned technical and creative genius. This workflow seems like a no brained to add to the power of premiere. I too have used Ae since it’s early days and marvel at the connection and disconnect between apps like Pr and Ae. It’s time to unite and clasp hands across the isle. If this pandemic has taught us anything’s it’s that we are all in this together, and that proxy workflow is the future.

[DP Driver]

This is an excellent idea! For all of us who work with proxies, this is a missing link. It’s also a forward looking idea. Advance proxy workflows need to become the norm in nonlinear editing software.

[khadgapa]

This would be a stand out feature for sure.

[emopaul2]

@JamesClark Wow! Thank you for that! It sounds like that would totally work. I so appreciate your long thoughtful post and hope it can help lots of people. And such a great illustration of why this is needed!

[FinalAdobePro]

As a workaround until this is a feature:

You can make 'dummy' 4k camera original files filled with black frames, derived from the proxies you already have. Import these dummies in to Premiere first, then attach your existing proxies to those dummies, then when you get the genuine originals later, you can use the 'attach full resolution media' command to relink those dummy originals to the genuine originals.

Do this with FFMPEG, which is free and open source. You'll need to add it to $path.

Then:
1. Make a 4k sequence in Pr, insert a black video, 5s in length. Export video to folder with proxies, choose different file format than the proxies.
2. Open Terminal (this only works on Mac, natively, but the technique can be adapted to windows)
3. Change directory to the directory containing all your proxies.
4. Run these commands (you'll need to substitute parts of it specific to your situation)

for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -stream_loop -1 -i 4k5sBlackVideo.mov -i "$i" -shortest -c:v copy -c:a copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a /pathToYourChosenOutputDirectory/"${i%.*}.mp4"; done

NOTE:
* I'm guessing your proxies are mp4s hence "*.mp4".
* I called my 4K 5 seconds of black video "4k5sBlackVideo.mov", you'll need to change this to whatever you called yours.
* The "/pathToYourChosenOutputDirectory" refers to wherever you'd like the dummy files to end up, easiest way to get the path and avoid typos is to drag that folder in to the terminal window when you're ready to enter this part of the command, it will then enter the path for you.
* The timecodes of the dummy files will be wrong and all start at 00:00:00:00, however this doesn't matter, when you relink the originals all your edits remain intact and those master clips switch over to the correct timecode.
* This uses BASH commands which won't work natively on windows out of the box, but can be enabled or otherwise made to work. Either that or you'll need to research how to adapt this in to scripts you can write in to .bat files. I couldn't provide examples because I can't test them.
* If you want to also remove x number of characters from the end of the source file in the resulting output file you can change ""${i.*}.mp4"" with ""${i%?.*}.mp4"", where the "?" represents how many characters to remove. For example if your proxy files have "_proxy" suffixes, you could alter the command to read ""${i%??????.*}.mp4"". I'm not sure if that's necessary or not but I think it helps with automatically linking all the proxies to the dummies at once, rather than one at a time.
5. This should near instantly create duplicates of all your proxies, except with no vision, just black. The duration, the audio and number of audio tracks will be the same however.

6. Import clips in to Premiere, attach your real proxies, enable proxies, edit, then when you get the genuine camera originals, disable proxies and reconnect full resolution media.

There is a lot to unpack and understand and there's a second workaround that can be done entirely in Premiere that I also figured out but there is a 5000 character limit to replies and the full write up came in at 18000 characters. This workaround is better for many reasons than the in-Premiere one I came up with. Good luck.

EDIT: As a final Addendum - You could do this entirely with just tools at your disposal and without FFMPEG and command line, and just use Media Encoder, the reason I don't suggest it though, is that I couldn't figure out a way to do this that satisfied all the requirements needed for it to work, but would also not take unreasonably long because of transcoding. This method involves no transcoding. The dummy files are made with just COPIES, of the contents of the 5s of black video, which is copied repeatedly until the resulting file is the length of the audio of the proxy file. There is no re-encoding of audio or video involved. If you have time and space to spare, you could just queue all your proxies in media encoder set them to export at 4K and use those as dummy originals. It's just that you'd have to wait for those dummies to be encoded and at that point you'll have wasted a lot of the time saved by downloading the proxies first before receiving the camera originals. (That's not the in-Premiere method I mentioned, I can post that too if anyone else comments any interest in it)

[josephbastien]

Hey, not sure if this is good workaround for you, but you could just create a quick premiere project and make a stringout of all the raw footage in a timeline. Then attach the proxies. Then select all the footage and set it to "Offline". Give the editor that premiere project. Once they open it up all the Raw media will be offline, but the proxies will still be attached at the correct aspect ratio/resolution

The only bummer is that you have to give them the project file with the original media imported first for this to work.

[DJP2014]

Thought I'd chime in case it's any help. I've just finished a project and was in the same situation, my workflow was this:

- Set Preferences/Media/Scale to frame size (important to do this BEFORE importing your proxies)
- Bring the 1080p footage into Premiere and edit it in a 4K sequence.
- When you get the full res 4K simply attach them to your proxies : Proxy/Reconnect Full Resolution media
- Any reframing or change to scale sticks. Then just export as HD if that's the resolution you're delivering.

Only thing, as mentioned here and which Adobe really need to fix, only works if proxies have identical no. of audio channels.

[GregoryYoung]

@ Antoine Autokroma.

Still forced to resize media. Generally not finishing at 4K.

[christopherc69089967]

We desperately need this feature! This workflow would be a game changer for remote editors

[Lineefilms]

So it seems like this feature was already there!!! thanks @MarkDTTC!