FCP has two Codec settings for proxies: ProRes Proxy and h264. Then there is a choice of various Scale and Size options, for myself I tend to use Same As Source for most projects, unless portability is a concern, or if I have to deal with a huge amount of footage.
Until recently I have been using ProRes Proxy exclusively. But now with the M1 machine, transcoding to h264 takes the same amount of time, and the Timeline is just as responsive, for a gain in size of about four times!
A h264 Proxy is actually 4 times smaller than a ProRes Proxy for the same original file. That's a huge gain of storage space. And since the time to generate the proxies is identical, I feel I now should move towards favoring h264 Proxies.
The only thing ProRes Proxy is 10bit as h264 is only 8bit, so banding...
What do you think? Leave a comment.
I would go with Proxy because it doesn't put more pressure on the CPU, while H264 does.
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