Generating proxies for smooth playback - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- Now that you're familiar with the exercise files and the project, what we're going to do is set up our DaVinci Resolve project to allow you for buttery smooth playback, while you're editing in the cut page, because realize that anytime you're working with MPEG four footage, it's going to be very, very taxing for your computer. The way the frames are stored, it's just a difficult format to play back in a very buttery smooth forward and backwards shuttling and scrolling. So what we're going to do is compress it to ProRes Proxy which believe it or not is actually higher quality than the MPEG four but much easier for your computer to play back because it's optimized specifically for post-production. The other thing we're going to do is take a look at this image here, which kind of looks very flat. And what we want to do is implement some very simple color management so that you don't have to do any color grading but you'll get a very good idea as to what the underlying image looks like. So we're going to do now is, we've already loaded up our footage into our resolved project, I'm going to click on the master bin and Shift click down to interviews so that we've got both of these bins highlighted, and it's showing us all of the footage in these bins, and I'm just going to make this larger, so we get a better look at these clips. Now, what I'm going to do is in order to set up our proxies, I'm going to click on any one of these clips and Command A to select all and on a PC, that'll be Control A, and I'm going to right click, and we're going to tell it to generate proxy media. But before we do that, we want to set our proxy media format. So to do that, we're going to come down to our project settings, this little gear in the lower right hand side, and in our master settings, we're going to scroll down to optimize media and render cash, and we're going to be working with proxy media, and what I'm going to do is click on this proxy media and choose ProRes 422 Proxy, a very lightweight Kodak, that'll play back much easier than H264. I'll choose that, the other thing I'm going to do is choose where I want my proxies to go, and in this case for the purposes of this training, let's go ahead and put them on my desktop. So I'll come down to my desktop, I'm going to create a new folder and we'll call this, (typing keyboard) Learning Cut Page Proxies. Now, ideally I would put this on my network hard drive or my media storage hard drive but for the purposes of this training and because this Kodak is lightweight enough this is a good place to put it, click open, and now this path has changed, let's go ahead and click save. All right, now I can come back to any one of these clips, right click and choose generate proxy media. Now this could take a couple minutes depending on the speed of your computer. So we'll give this a couple moments in order for this green bar to fill up when it's done generating the media. and then we take a look to see how you can ensure that this proxy media has been created. Now that our proxies are generated we're going to want to double check it, I'm going to take us into list view here, and I'm going to right click on any one of these headers, and I'm going to choose proxy media path, and I'm going to choose proxy, close it out. You can see proxy media path right here, so it's showing me where my media lives. Then I'm going to scroll and depending on your setup, your column will show up in any multiple number of places. So I'm going to go ahead, scroll to the the end here where the proxy is and I'm just going to bring it, click it, and drag it. So that it's next to the media path, so that I have a quick view of how this proxies were created. Finally, I want to come up to my playback menu and make sure that use proxy media if available is check marked, which it is by default, and it is right now, so we can keep moving forward. Now that your proxies are in place, you can assure yourself that you can have nice, smooth buttery playback while you're editing, and it doesn't bog down the performance of your computer.