Updated: The Complete Guide to Premiere Pro Proxies and Proxy Workflows

If you didn’t already know, proxy video workflows in Adobe Premiere Pro allow you to edit high-resolution footage more efficiently and smoothly. Proxies are usually low-resolution copies of the original video that are easier to handle for your computer. They’re temporary files that you use in your edit before reverting to the original media for finishing.

Their biggest advantage is providing smooth playback on a system that cannot play the full-resolution media, so your system can work as fast as you do.

Contents

• Why use proxies?

• What’s a typical proxy workflow?

• Proxy icons and indicators

• Proxy watermarks

• Proxies and markers

• Proxies and preview rendering

• Proxies and Render and Replace

• Proxies and export

• Limitations of Premiere Pro proxy workflows

• Proxies and Productions

• Sharing proxies in a Team

• Making proxies in Premiere Pro automatically

• Making proxies in Premiere Pro manually

• Making proxies using third-party software

• Red RAW has built-in proxies

• Using proxies in After Effects

• User experiences: proxy problems I’ve helped solve

• Summing it up with some advice

Why use proxies?

I often hear people say “I don’t need proxies. My system handles my long-GOP 4k footage with ease”. I tend to disagree. Even with a beefy system, you’ll drop frames on compressed high-res footage while scrubbing and trimming in the timeline.

For example, my Dell Precision 7680 system plays just about everything I throw at it, but Premiere Pro struggles with 12-bit 8K cRAW footage from a Canon EOS R5 on that system. So I make proxies. On the same machine, a highly compressed 4K file plays nicely, but scrubbing and trimming isn’t perfectly smooth. Dropping frames when trying to find the exact right frame means I spend more time finding it. So, again, I make proxies. It’s just faster.

I’ve seen cynics whose jaws drop when they try using proxies for the first tim