Generating Proxies for huge project (subfolder clips)

Do you really have to click on the actual *clip icon* in the media pool in order to create proxies? I am working on a feature with thousands and thousands of clips shot over two months. I want to create proxies for the clips that the previous editor incorporated into the full feature timeline. I can't simply click on the timeline clips to generate proxies (it's pretty ridiculous that you can't do this), and if I go to the Media "page" then "select all" for the media used for the project, only the clips that are not in subfolders are converted to proxies. Do I really have to *manually* go through 300 subfolders just so that I can click on the actual clips to generate proxies?

From the left hand pane, you can select multiple bins to see all their clips at once.

I spent some time organizing files over the weekend, and have been able to make more sense of what is possible.

Clicking on a folder will not select any clips in its subfolders, so you have to manually select each subfolder (containing no more subfolders) in order to selects the clips in that folder. This means you can manually select multiple folders in the left hand pane, but if there are files in subfolders of those folders, you will not be able to select those clips.

For this project, I was handed a huge drive (18TB) containing thousands of clips managed rather poorly, so obviously the situation is not ideal, but the limitations of not being able to select clips in subfolders makes creating proxies extremely tedious (having to select each individual clip, rather than just all the clips in all the folders).

if you shift/control click multiple bins in the "tree" on the left it should also show the clips inside subfolders, pretty sure about that.
See the screenshots below, first screenshot i selected only one bin containing 3 files and a subfolder. second screenshot i selected the master as well, but still not the subfolder. still, it shows the files within the subfolders.

Screenshot (118).png (23.52 KiB) Viewed 3306 times

Screenshot (119).png (34.06 KiB) Viewed 3306 times

But there are multiple ways to select all your clips.

You could create a smart bin, and filter out all the video or/and video+audio. I guess this is the most elegant way.

you can also go to file --> media management and transcode all your media from there. It's not the fancy new proxy workflow though, but it can definitely work for big projects.

I think you can even go to the cut page, and press the source tape button, and navigate to the master bin to reveal all the media inside the project. (although with such a big project i guess it could take a while, or even crash)

Or after you selected all the clips, insert them with a hotkey to a huge timeline and render out individual clips from there.

if you shift/control click multiple bins in the "tree" on the left it should also show the clips inside subfolders, pretty sure about that.

Gotcha (and "duh" on my part). It's a matter of expanding as much as possible in the left hand pane to expose clips all the way to the bottom of the folder hierarchy. Unfortunately, it's tricky when the file structure contains a lot of subfolders within subfolders. Not to mention when the subfolders contain tons of unnecessary files, so that once all the subfolder have been expanded, selecting files from the right pane takes a lot of effort (going through and selecting the right ones).

Another part of the difficulty I'm currently experiencing is that I'm working from the Edit page (so I can reveal only clips on a particular timeline), and Resolve won't let me resize my Bin Windows. I made my program monitor larger, and now when I try to click on the boundaries to resize the various panes, I am unable to resize things. I assume this is a glitch, but it's persistent and I can't seem to alter it. The limitations with customizing a workspace within Resolve (especially to use more than two monitors) have me on the verge of going back to Premiere.

But there are multiple ways to select all your clips. You could create a smart bin, and filter out all the video or/and video+audio. I guess this is the most elegant way.

Good to know. It will be interesting to see how Resolve handles this with the number of clips and folders I am faced with.

you can also go to file --> media management and transcode all your media from there. It's not the fancy new proxy workflow though, but it can definitely work for big projects.

The problem with this route is Resolve "knowing" where all those new files are (vs. building from within using "generate proxies" so Resolve can do it's file mapping magic). I know I can make it happen manually, but the previous editor tried this several times, and because there are so many clips and folders for the media utilized on this massive timeline, usually the "maps" would fail to populate or find all the proper proxies that match the originals.

I think you can even go to the cut page, and press the source tape button, and navigate to the master bin to reveal all the media inside the project. (although with such a big project i guess it could take a while, or even crash)

I'll try this next.

Or after you selected all the clips, insert them with a hotkey to a huge timeline and render out individual clips from there.

This would take a million years and likely fail during the process, but this could be a feasible (though tedious) method if I broke it down into smaller parts.

Thanks for your suggestions, Rick.

For those who stumble across this thread... use it as a lesson for the importance of organizing your media! Some people think it's just a matter of being OCD or overly persnickety, but unforeseen situations arise all the time, and if your media is organized from the get go, you won't have people spending days or even weeks wrangling and transcoding data instead of editing to complete the project!

Man... now I am just wondering what resolve is actually doing when it shows progress on "Generate Proxy Media." I took about 35 clips from the main timeline and put them on their own timeline. I then used "reveal in project" to show the video files for the clips. I clicked "render proxies" and the render ran for around an hour and a half. The last time I looked at my screen, the progress bar was at 89%. I assumed this was for all the clips on the timeline (all the clips selected when I hit "Generate Proxies"). I just looked at my screen again, and the progress bar is now at 5%. If that initial render was for just one clip, then this is not realistic. My machine is a dual Xeon (16 core, so 32 threads) with 128GB of ECC RAM and dual Quadro GPU's. The process is reading from the Thunderbolt GDrive (which AJA speedtest shows to have a read/write throughput of 180MB/sec) and writing to an SSD RAID (which AJA Speedtest clocks at 1200MB/sec). If it really takes Resolve 2 hours to convert one video file for proxies, then this is definitely not a feasible option.

EDIT: There are 55 files in the location to which the Proxies are writing. I'm not sure why, since the Timeline from which I selected the footage only has 35 clips. What is further puzzling me, is that if all the clips on the current timeline finished transcoding (as indicated above), what is the new progress bar currently on my screen telling me (what proxies are now being generated)?

EDIT 2: Even though that second progress bar hilariously showed "three days" as the render estimate at one point, it finished in about half an hour. Still not sure why there were two separate progress bars for the Generate Proxy process.

So... while proxy media was indeed generated for the clips (it's in the folder on the RAID), when I click on a clip on the timeline for which the proxy media was generated and select "find in media pool," the clip that is shown in the Media Pool pane has no information in the "proxy media path" column.

This is aggravating.