Proxy Workflow

I work with a variety of footage from DJI drone to Red Epic Dragon. I want to integrate a proxy workflow into my current workflow. Currently Proxy Mode and Smart Render in the Playback menu is not powerful enough. Does Resolve have a proxy workflow similar to Premiere where I can toggle between the proxies and the raw assets?

I think overall, PP has the better proxy system. But you can still make things work in Resolve.

I'm not aware of any icon for this, but there's an item under the Playback menu that allows you to turn proxies on and off.

The "optimized media" function is the easiest way, and will probably get you what you need. Alternatively, you can render out whatever media suits you as proxies, and then do a folder swap back to the originals when finalizing the project. Note that you should use media & proxies with the same extensions (e.g. MOV, MP4) if you do this. otherwise you have to re-conform the timeline, which (in my experience) doesn't always work.

Playback > Proxy Mode just allows the processing to be performed in a lower resolution. This doesn't always help with drone footage which can be taxing to even decode unless you're using the Studio version of Resolve together with a GPU or CPU that supports hardware accelerated decoding of h.264/h.265.

What you probably want is either:

• Playback > Use Optimized Media If Available
  Optimized media is created by right clicking a bin or clip > Generate Optimized Media
  
  
• Proxy files that you convert elsewhere, for example with File > Media Management
  Switch between proxies and original using the Reconform from Bins feature, right click a timeline in a bin, select Timelines > Reconform from bins (check out the manual for full details)

I wrote up a short blurb about this for the Frame.io workflow guide: https://workflow.frame.io/guide/resolve-proxies