How to work with Proxies in FCP

[Alister Chapman]

Hi guys. I have been looking into this and this is the workflow suggested by Sony for dealing with Proxies in FCP. I have tried it and it works. It is a workaround and there is some fiddling to be done when you swap the proxies for the full res clips.

From within FCP go "Import" "XDCAM" to start the XDCAM Transfer tool.
In the Transfer Tool go to the "Add Source" button at the bottom left and navigate to the memory stick, drive or camera where your proxy files are stored. Navigate to the "Sub" folder where you will see the proxies saved as .MXF files. Select one of the MXF's and click "open".

The Proxies will appear in the transfer tool, select the files you wish to work with and click "import" just as you would with full res clips. You can even make subclips if you wish.

Perform your edit with the proxies within FCP.

Once the edit is done you must delete the proxies from your hard drive. The Proxies will be stored in the location set in the Transfer Tools preferences. FCP will now show the media as being offline.

Now you import the full resolution clips. Connect the camera or deck with the Disc with the full res clips. Then from within the Transfer tool select the clips to import as you would normally, except deselect "send clips to final cut pro project". You don't want to add the clips to your project at this point.

Go back to FCP and start to reconnect the media by right clicking on an offline file and selecting "reconnect files". Click the locate button and point the program to the High Resolution clips stored in the import location set in the transfer tools preferences (this is where the proxies were before you trashed them). You must uncheck the "matched Name and Reel Only" box as the clips will have slightly different names. Subclips (proxies) have an extra "S01" added to the end of the file name, so you have to manually re-link each clip which is a pain. In addition because of the slightly different clip names you will get a "File Attribute Mismatch" error message, but you can ignore this, just click continue.

Once you have your clips in FCP the last thing to check is that the sequence settings are correct for the full resolution files.

It's far from perfect, but it works. If you were going to use this workflow you might be better off using the continuous clip record mode in the camera as you would then only have one single clip to swap out.

My thanks to David Young at Sony PSE for helping me with this.

[John Godwin]

Alister,

I've been trying to find the current workflow for xdcam proxies in FCP (7) ... this post from you is the closest I've come. Is this still valid? Is a more refined approach available?

Thanks for the reply, in advance ...

John

[Alister Chapman]

This is still the best way as far as I know. You thing to consider is using single clip mode in the camera so you have fewer files to re-name

[John Godwin]

Thanks for the reply. Someone else is shooting this, and it's covering a preracing event news style. So I'll have to more or less take what I can get.

[Alister Chapman]

I need to read my posts before I click submit!

I meant "One thing to consider......."

[Greg Boston]

Alister,

Back when Nate Weaver was still using the F350, he had come up with a workaround also. I think he started by renaming the proxy file clips to match the full res clip file names (removing the extra characters from proxy names). Then, you can bring those files in and edit with them and do the swap out at the end. Your file names will already match because of the proxy rename you did earlier on.

Give that route a try.

-gb-

[Alister Chapman]

Yeah, you can re-name at the start or the end. If you do it at the start and then don't use the files in the final edit you have wasted time re-naming clips that you don't use.

It will work either way.

Hopefully it will be sorted out correctly before too long.