Getting Up To Speed On Resolve 17’s New Proxy Workflow

This may be too obvious to mention, but isn’t it the case that, once I transform a given, say, BRAW clip into a Proxy clip, I no longer have access to the Camera Raw processing on the Color page? So I’m not clear about the workflow if I want to both use Proxy media AND use the BRAW controls. Help!

Thanks, Joey, I enjoyed this. To add to it, there are other reasons to make your proxies outside of Resolve. Resolve still appears, as of version 17.1, not to be able to properly handle audio sample rates in the original footage that are different from 48kHz when it makes its own proxies.

The problem is that even if the sample rate in the original footage is different from 48kHz — for instance, 44.1 kHZ — the process appears to change all samples in all proxies to 48kHz.

This creates individual proxies that play fine if you use them for anything for other than proxies, but when Resolve plays them back as proxies the process seems to expect audio at the original sample rate. Thus the proxy system plays back 48kHz audio at the original footage’s sample rate speed. Thus if the original was 44.1, it plays the audio more slowly. Thus it goes out of sync right away and the pitch changes.

Several people reported this during the beta process, but it hasn’t been fixed. Or, if those of us who have seen the problem have been using a wrong setting somewhere, no one has pointed it out.

However, the system for linking to proxies made elsewhere seems to work fine, as long each proxy matches the sample rate of each original. Since keeping the same sample rate is usually the default in transcoding systems, I haven’t had a problem with doing it that way yet.

It’s disappointing, though, not to be able to use the Resolve system all the way through if you have different sample rates to deal with. It’s so simple to create the proxies that it would be really nice if it worked.

When you render the proxy clip – it will have whatever camera raw options you selected at the time of render baked in. You will still be able to access the camera raw settings – but changing them will require either re-generating proxies, or switching to the original media in the playback menu

Hi Joey, questions! Still new to proxy workflow/proxies in general:
1. would this be the standard settings to set in your project settings for generating proxies (Dnx HR LB, half resolution etc.) in Davinci for each project? Still trying to understand what is exactly DNX codec too.
2. So the first step is to set those proxy settings, then to generate ALL clips for smoother color grading?
3. Then when exporting, do I just turn OFF the “Use Proxy Media if Available” to switch back to 4k/5k video export? What happens if I don’t uncheck that?
please help, thank you!!!

Hey! So DNX is Avid’s standard codec for post production. It has great performance and wide adoption. It will edit much faster then H264 will – at any resolution.

If you export without use proxy media – it will render with the original media instead – so yea going back to your full res material. However I would strongly recommend reviewing the grade on the original media first before outputting – as sometimes proxies can effect things like qualifiers, sharpness, noise, etc – you may want to tweak some stuff based on that.