Melanie Lerner | December 1, 2010
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/proxies_and_workflow_tips/
In Andrew Kramer’s tutorial he shows simple tips on how to work on a project quickly at a decent resolution. He explains that a proxy is a lower resolution version (video or still image) of a project that temporarily takes the place of something that is higher resolution. The benefits are being able to work and preview your project faster.
To start with he says to check your composition and footage settings (HDTV is a standard 1920 x 1080 format). Once you set the dimensions that you want, you have a couple options as to how to work with a lower resolution in After Effects. The first is to lower the resolution of the project window (say quarter, third, half, or full size), but doing this means After Effects is still sampling from the bigger footage file. Another, better way to go about it is to look at the output module and format a proxy that way. You can right click on the footage layer, go to create proxy – movie and a render queue window will pop up. You can then go to output module settings to format your proxy, which is how a proxy saves itself. You can choose such settings such as Quicktime movie and change animation to a photo jpeg sequence, then hit ok and render. Now a square box pops up next to your footage to show that the footage has been converted to a photo jpeg Quicktime movie (hence it’s easier to work with). You have the liberty of toggling the switch back and forth between your regular full resolution project and the proxy clip. You can shut the proxy off at any time as well.
Now if you have several pieces of footage you can’t unfortunately convert all of them at the same time and create a proxy but you can create a proxy template that can be applied to each. To do this, right click – create proxy – movie (do this for each file so that all files are included in the render queue), then go to output module – make template. Now if you go to the output module and hold down the shift key for each item, you can select all the render queue items and choose the template you made to apply to all of them. Or, if you would rather make global changes in regards to proxy settings, you can change After Effect’s defaults by going to edit and output module so that when you add your composition to the render que, your settings are already in place.
Kramer mentions too that if you are working with a proxy that is ½ the resolution, you should set the original file to ½ the resolution as well (there’s no point in seeing extra pixels if you aren’t going to render them). Proxies do come with their limitations. For instance, you never want to do motion tracking with a proxy in place. Also you will want to check that your resolution is not set to full while tracking because After Effects has a tendency to change it back for you. And if a render ever dies an easy trick is just to duplicate it and the composition will re-render for you.
Kramer concludes by saying that you never want to render the final video using a proxy. To double check that the proxy is turned off while rendering you can go to add to render queue – proxy use – use no proxy. For the most part, proxies are extremely helpful and a quick way to work while keeping fairly decent resolution. Color correction and compositing are just two things that would benefit from proxy use. Kramer's techniques are certainly viable in rendering large files, which I know will come in handy in my current and future projects.
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