Struggling with Motion Jpeg and H265 performance

Hiya,

We use to only work with Red material which works great in Davinci.
Now we are using more material from our 1DX Mark 2 which is Motion Jpeg 800Mbps and H265 from Dji Phantom 4 Pro. These videos play very poorly in Davinci (and all other programs too).

So I'm looking at different ways to create proxies.
I know that you can create proxies inside Davinci, but one downside is that the proxies are then only visible in Davinci. Sometimes I like to just play them in Explorer. Also if Davinci creates the proxies it seems as if they are harder to move to a laptop, right?

So I did a test that I created proxies with half the resolution and put them in a folder, then I had the originals in another folder. If I rename the folder then Davinci switched to the proxy/source back and forward and this seemed to work fine. Is this an ok or recommended workflow? I noticed I had to shut down the project to be able to rename the folder.
I always thought it was a bit easier in FCPX since they had 3 folders, Proxy, Optimized and Originals and then you could just put whatever you wanted into these folders, but Davinci has completely random names on their proxy folders.

Any thoughts would be great. Ideally I would converted the material to say DNxHR files 4k and work with them, but the files are SO big so I can't justify the hardware space for them.

Thanks
/Andreas

Try this workflow:

I noticed I had to shut down the project to be able to rename the folder.

Yes, this was raised elsewhere. Once Resolve touches a file, even just to preview it, it doesn't close the file handle, and because NTFS is lame it will not allow operations such as renaming or moving or deleting outside of Resolve.

That said, renaming directories for active files from underneath Resolve wouldn't work even on reasonable filesystems. My understanding is that the proper external proxy workflow is to use the Reconform options in the File menu. (Ah, as I now see Steve's video explains nicely.)

Try this workflow:

That looks pretty good. A bit tedious that you need to conform every time you switch. In FCPX I would switch back and forward often between proxy and raw to check sharpness because the proxies could look fine when they actually were not.

I wonder how would this work on a bigger project. I have one movie that has thousands of clips organised in many different bins. Here its important to view the clips efficiently. It sounds like I would almost need two folder structures with bins, one with Raw/various bins and one with Proxy/various bins. Or maybe have only the Proxies in bins and then just have 1 folder with all the Raw videos in, that way I would not have to organise both at the same time.

Also any advice for color grading? The Drone footage with h265 will be impossible to grade directly with. Maybe the best way would be to first edit, and when the edit is done cache the timeline and then use the cache when grading. I also remember that you could cache the nodes before the grade in the network.

Thanks for the help.
/Andreas

I have done a few days of testing and I'm liking this workflow more and more.
This feels like an easy way to get proxy files that also can be viewn outside of Davinci.
I'm also experimenting with exporting to H264, if you only keyframe distance 1 they are really fast to work with in Davinci, but are are also much smaller and plays nicer with other video players. I like the idea of being able to dump them to an Ipad for example to review in the car.

/Andreas