How to create and edit proxies in Final Cut Pro

(or How to edit at Starbucks... or the cottage... or the airplane...)

We've got a major heatwave going on up here in the Vancouver area, and seeing as I don't have air conditioning, I decided to do some prep last night so I could edit away from my home office.

I'm editing a 720P24 DVCPro HD project, and didn't want to lug a hard drive around with me. The solution was to recompress all of the footage into a codec that would takes up less space. A lot less space.

H.264 right?

Well, yeah, except it wasn't as straight forward as I thought it would be, due to what general googling revealed to be a bug in Compressor.

Here's the problem: Compressor 3.0.5 doesn't read timecode the same way Final Cut Pro does. Some say this is only with 24P footage. I've seen this in both DVCPro HD and RED. The result for me was that Compressor was seeing timecode as 5 seconds (!) earlier than FCP, and therefore any H.264 files created in Compressor would have the wrong timecode, and would therefore be useless.

The Solution: Use FCP Batch Export

First problem is that FCP doesn't have an H.264 sequence preset, so you can't Batch Export to H.264. You can try doing an MP4 mashup, but you won't get timecode.

So the first thing we have to do is create a sequence preset for the format we want. Then that preset will appear for us in our Batch Export settings.

(1) Create H.264 Sequence Preset

In the Final Cut Pro menu, click on Audio/Video Settings. Then click on the Sequence Presets tab. Click on DV NTSC 48 Khz (it doesn't really matter, but that one is a good start), then click the Duplicate button. A new window will pop up. Copy these settings (these settings assume you are using 16x9 footage, such as 1080P, 720P, or DV Anamorphic). Then click okay. You have now created a new setting called H.264 640x360.

(2) Batch Export your footage

Import your footage into a new project. Select it all, and choose "Batch Export" from the File menu.

In the resulting Export Queue window, hit Command-A to select all of the clips, then hit the Settings button.

First choose your destination. This is where the new files will go, and should be a different folder than where the original files are. I made a folder called "proxy".

Next, select Quicktime Movie for Format, and H.264 640x360 for Settings.

Next, click on Set Naming Options..., and click the box next to Add File Type Extension.

Then, make sure Make Self-Contained is checked, and click "OK" to return to the Export Queue window. Click the Export button to begin exporting. Depending on how much footage you have, this can take awhile, but possibly not as long as you might think. It was about 1.5x realtime for me on my 8-core Mac Pro.

(3) Prepare your project for proxy editing

This assumes you haven't done any editing yet. Logging, but not editing. (If you already have sequences going, use the instructions in section 4 in reverse.)

The easiest way to set everything up is to copy your new proxy files to your laptop (note: my 98GB of DVC Pro HD footage was now about 6GB of H.264). Then, copy over your FCP project file.

Open the FCP project file on the laptop. When asked to reconnect, find the proxy files and reconnect. Done. Go away. Go to Starbucks. Go to the lake. Go to France.

(4) Edit

You'll find that editing with H.264 files is a little different than normal. You have to render if you want to do any transitions or anything, but it's great for assembling a cut.

(5) Reconnect your HD footage

You're back in your edit bay now, so stop using those proxies.

First, in your Proxy project, select your newly made sequence (or sequences) and export to XML by choosing File, Export, XML. Use the default settings.

Next, in your OLD project Import the XML file. What you're doing here is bring in the sequence(s) in a way that you can modify the sequence settings (because we don't want 640x360 anymore!). Copy the settings in this image, but be sure to select your own settings under Sequence Settings. Click OK, and your sequence(s) will be created in your old project, with media offline.

Note: If you're not sure about what settings to use, find out by first creating a new sequence, dropping some of your footage on it, agreeing to change the sequence settings, then right click on the sequence and choose Settings....

Now, select all of the sequences that were imported, choose File, Reconnect Media, and reconnect your original footage.

(6) All done

If you did step 5 correctly, your sequence shouldn't need to be rendered. If you have a green or red bar above your timeline, simply delete the sequences and try again.

Despite this being a huge post, this process only takes a few minutes to complete (plus computing time to recompress footage).

I'll update this post when I have a chance to test the process with the new ProRes proxy codec in Final Cut Studio 3. I have a feeling it won't come close to these files sizes, but it would be much better for editing in general.

Comments

[K]

Hello,

That's a great post. Just what I was looking for. Do you know if using the Matrox compressHD accelerator card still produces files that will import into FCP?

(I've tried creating H.264 files using ffmpeg, and FCP won't accept them - it just gives me a "General Error" message).

Kind Regards

K.

[John]

I'm not sure, but I think so. I just got a Matrox MXO2 Mini (with Max) the other day, so I'll be testing this out soon.

[Angela]

As for me it is a very useful post.
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[Bradley]

just the info I was looking for, thanks!