What are Proxies and why do I need them?

All right, we're going to start this course by learning what Proxies are. It's pretty heavy going for the first video, I understand, but it's kind of fundamental to what we need to do. 

So first up, what are Proxies? They're placeholders. It's so that your original footage, that you've shot or somebody's given to you, that's super big quality, high quality, and it's stressing your machine out. It's either really big, it's using a codec that your computer doesn't like, there's lots of different reasons, that this footage is just very hard to edit. 

So a Proxy basically is a duplicate, and it's just smaller and less quality, so that you can edit it quickly, add your effects, you can do everything to it, and what happens is, when you hit 'Render', it'll go back to, instead of using the proxy, it'll go back to the original footage, so that when it's rendering it's actually rendering the super duper high quality stuff, and not your proxy. It's just like this kind of, like little bit of form, a little file that you can use, so that your machine doesn't die or melt, but you start with great footage, you'll end up with great footage, does that make sense? 

Do you have to use proxies if you're going to be an advanced Premiere Pro user? You don't have to, you should understand them, but like a lot of the time I'm not using proxies, mainly because I shoot for YouTube, so when I shoot on my camera I shoot in h.264, because I don't need the amazing color depth, and it's not going out to the cinema, or broadcast, or a TV show. So I shoot in a format that's pretty lightweight, still 4K, and I can get away with this particular laptop not using proxies, but as soon as somebody sends me some Apple ProRes or kind of GoPro CineForm, then it's all about the proxies, because poor old laptop here is not made for that heavy duty workload. 

 Let's actually make some proxies, instead of just talking about them.