How to Create Proxies for Raw Footage Without Slowing Down Review

Your timeline stutters every time you scrub. The fans on your machine sound like a jet on a runway. You are color grading a wedding film shot on 6K raw, and the playhead crawls across the screen like it owes you money. I have been there, and the fix is not a faster computer. The fix is proxies.

Proxies are lightweight stand-in copies of your heavy raw clips. You edit against the small files, then the software swaps in the original media at export. Done right, proxies make a brutal raw project feel like cutting basic 1080p. Done wrong, they balloon your storage, break your relink, and waste an afternoon. Here is how I make proxies the right way, and the part most tutorials skip: what happens after the cut, when you have to show the work to a client.

Why raw footage needs proxies in the first place

Raw and high-bitrate formats are not built for playback. They are built to hold the maximum amount of picture information so you can push color and recover highlights later. Formats like 6K raw, 4K ProRes 4444, or 10-bit log footage carry far more data per frame than your editor can decode in real time on a normal machine. So the timeline chokes.

A proxy strips that down. You transcode each clip into a small, easy-to-decode format at a lower resolution, and the editor plays it back instantly. The picture quality during editing drops, but that does not matter. You are cutting for timing and story, not judging final color on a proxy.

The payoff is real. Smooth scrubbing. Instant playback with effects on. No more rendering a preview just to watch three seconds. And critically, you can edit on a laptop in a coffee shop instead of being chained to a tower.

How to create proxies for raw footage, step by step

The exact buttons differ between Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut, but the logic is identical everywhere. Follow this and you will not paint yourself into a corner.

A few hard-won notes. Match your proxy frame rate to the source exactly, because a mismatch will throw your sync off later. Keep the same aspect ratio so drawn comments and reframes line up. And name your proxy folder something obvious like _PROXIES so future you can find and delete it in one click when the project wraps.

• Proxy codec chosen and tested on your slowest machine
• Resolution set to half source
• All clips transcoded in one batch
• Audio kept in sync at the source frame rate
• Originals backed up and untouched in a separate folder

The biggest mistake I see is people transcoding to a proxy codec that is still too heavy. If your proxies stutter, they are not proxies. Go smaller. A proxy that plays back perfectly at lower quality beats a pretty proxy that lags.

The part nobody warns you about: review and approvals

Here is my contrarian take. The proxy workflow that most editors obsess over is the easy half. Making the cut smooth is a solved problem. The actual bottleneck in raw-footage projects is everything after the timeline locks: getting the director, the client, and the brand manager to watch it, comment on the right frame, and approve it without forty confused emails.

Think about what usually happens. You finish the cut, export a heavy review file, and now you are stuck. Email bounces the attachment because it is too big. So you upload to a file host, paste a link, and wait. The client replies with feedback like "around the middle, the bit with the logo, make it shorter." Which logo shot? Which middle? You are guessing. Then they send a second round of notes that contradicts the first, and you have no version history to prove what changed.

That is the real cost of raw projects. Not the rendering. The reviewing.

“

Smooth playback is for you. Smooth approval is for everyone who pays you.

This is exactly why I run review through PlayPause instead of file transfer tools. Email, WeTransfer, Google Drive, and Dropbox are great at moving a file from point A to point B. They are not review tools. They have no concept of a timecode, a comment pinned to frame 1,204, a version stack, or an approval lock. You are using a delivery truck to do a surgeon's job.

With PlayPause, you upload the cut and your reviewers leave frame-accurate comments. They can draw directly on the frame to circle the logo they mean. They @mention the colorist so the right person sees the right note. Every revision becomes a new version in a stack, and you can put two versions side by side to prove what you fixed. When the client is happy, they hit an approval lock and you have a clear, dated yes. No more guessing what "the middle bit" meant.

Review_Cut_v4.mp4In Review

212160p · ProRes

00:34 / 02:18

SR

Sarah 0:34

Frame-accurate note, everyone sees the exact same thing.

A real scenario: the 6K commercial that almost ate a week

Picture a thirty second spot shot on 6K raw across two days. The editor cuts on ProRes Proxy files, so the timeline flies. Good. Then the agency, the brand, and two stakeholders need to sign off. This is where projects die.

The old way: export a giant file, fight the upload, and chase scattered notes across email threads and a group chat. Three rounds of revisions blur together because nobody can tell version 2 from version 3. The editor reworks the wrong shot twice.

The PlayPause way: the editor drops the cut into a workspace and shares a secure link with a password and an expiry date so the unreleased spot stays private. Stakeholders comment on exact frames. The brand manager draws on the frame where the product needs more screen time. Round two goes into a version stack right beside round one, compared side by side. The agency lead approves with a lock. What took a tense week of back and forth turns into two clean review rounds.

The proxies made the edit fast. PlayPause made the sign-off fast. You need both halves to actually finish on time.

Why PlayPause beats Frame.io for this exact job

If you have shopped for a review tool, you have met Frame.io. It is capable. It is also priced per seat, which is the quiet killer for anyone doing client work. Every freelancer, every client, every brand stakeholder you invite raises the bill. The more people who need to review your raw-footage project, and review is the whole point, the more you pay. Your costs scale with collaboration, which is exactly backward.

PlayPause charges flat per workspace, not per seat. You add clients, freelancers, and stakeholders without watching the meter. The pricing is simple and honest.

And you do not give up capability to get that price. PlayPause has frame-accurate comments with drawing and @mentions, version stacks with side-by-side compare, approval locks, and secure share links with passwords, expiry, domain restriction, and watermarking. It pulls Camera-to-Cloud proxies straight from set, so your review files can be ready before you even get home. It has Premiere Pro and After Effects panels so you upload without leaving your edit. Guests can upload with no account. You get viewer analytics, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zapier connections, and one centralized home for every asset.

That last point matters for raw projects specifically. When your media is scattered across drives and hosts, you lose clips. Centralized assets mean the proxy, the cut, the feedback, and the approval all live in one place.

The bottom line

Proxies solve playback. Pick a light codec, transcode at half resolution into one clean folder, keep your frame rate matched, and edit on the small files while you deliver from the originals. That part is mechanical, and now you have the checklist.

The part that actually decides whether your project ships on time is review and approval. Do not run that through file transfer tools that were never built for feedback, and do not pay per seat to add the very people you need in the room. Make your proxies fast, then make your sign-off just as fast.

Try PlayPause free and turn your next raw-footage cut into smooth review, clear versions, and a clean approval. Start at the Free plan, zero dollars, and only move up when your team grows.