HEVC Proxy Workflow?

Hello All.

One of the things I was most hoping for for 10.4 was a HEVC Proxy option - to create super lightweight, portable versions of Libs. Any idea if this is somehow possible? ( away from office at the moment hence haven't gone digging into FCPX yet)

Thanks!

Proxies are always ProRes, since the purpose is to provide good editing performance on machines without sufficient horsepower to edit the full-res originals. Making an HEVC proxy would be contrary to that purpose since it (a) would probably slow down editing, and (b) might only be feasible on newer machines with Skylake or Kaby Lake CPUs, the only ones with HEVC hardware acceleration.

If you made the HEVC proxy resolution small enough, maybe more machines could run that, but already the FCPX 1/4-resolution proxy is near the limit of allowing good editing decisions in some cases. E.g, if they had to use 640 x 480 to get HEVC proxies fast enough for a non-accelerated machine to run, the resolution would be too low for many editing tasks.

If the purpose is reduce library size, that can be done right now by keeping proxies outside the library. The procedure for that is described in the Ripple Training Media Management tutorial.

However external proxy management is a somewhat finicky procedure and FCPX really needs better support for this. That would help everyone, not just those with new-generation HEVC-capable hardware. What's needed is better proxy support (esp for external proxies and the relink case), not super-small HEVC proxies that might only work on a limited number of current machines.

Re cloud-based proxies and collaborative workflow for remote editors (not just those on a LAN), improvement over a wide range of items is needed -- not just proxies. There is no built-in locking system for projects, events or libraries, and no way to reconcile metadata changes within a single event by two editors. Adobe just rolled out some improvements in this area for Premiere. I'm sure Apple could do a smoother, more reliable job adding such features to FCPX -- provided they ever get around to it.

Actually, I think we're about to see third party proxies in FCPX become more common. As per the release notes;
"Third-party asset management systems can now send low-resolution media to Final Cut Pro through XML import and later replace those low resolution files with full resolution files through another XML import"

One thing I find a lot of editors don't understand is compression. Smaller files sizes usually mean HARDER playback for the computer. Contrary to what you'd think, but the truth of Long-GOP, small file size, highly compressed files.