New user, trying to automate my Premiere Pro CC proxy workflow

[Chahk]

I have a bunch of devices that I shoot home videos on - a few different GoPros, some phones, etc. They are all in different resolutions (1080p, 2k, 4k), frame rates (23.9, 30, 60 fps, plus some slow motion with 239fps), and frame sizes (mostly in 4:3 but some in 16:9.)

I work in Premiere Pro CC and use ProRes proxies. However, different frame sizes and rates require separate presets for Media Encoder. Currently I have to sit there and choose which presets to use for each video depending on their metadata. If I accidentally choose the wrong preset I end up with badly mangled proxies - stretched out or squeezed videos. It's time consuming and prone to errors, at least for me. I was wondering if there's a way to automate this process - basically have the computer choose the correct preset that corresponds to the type of video. Reddit brought me here, and I'm wondering how to get started.

I understand that I need to start with a Folder Monitor, but how do I go about "sniffing" the media attributes are and then encoding to ProRes? Do I need separate workflows for each frame size, or can I somehow use variables and then pass them to FFmpeg? I'm not very familiar with ffmpeg so any help would be much appreciated.

[failsafe5000]

You could use conditional nodes to check the videos for frame sizes and rates. Similar to how I used to do it on an old workflow:



With this node if the frame rate matched what I put in, then it would be a success and go to the top encoding node, if it didn't match it would go to the bottom encoding node. You could set up additional conditional nodes after each one, that runs to an encoder if it passes, or to the next conditional node if it fails

[emcodem]

Hey Chahk,

Welcome to the forum!
That should be pretty simple to do with one very simple workflow, keeping resolution and framerate, aspect ration and such AFAIK is always just copied by default in ffmpeg, so no special settings needed. Mapping all Audios could get more problematic in case your input files have smart audio configurations.
The only problem is that we don't currently have a prores encoder built-in so we need to use custom ffmpeg for it.

Here a simple workflow for you to import, just change the input folder on the starting "Folder" processor and output folder on the last "Folder" processor.

prores_proxy.xml

(4.37 KiB) Downloaded 416 times

But if that is all you need and you prefer to start your proxy generation manually instead of watchfolder, a simple batch would do for you as well.
Write this to a file called create_proxy.bat, place the .bat file on your desktop and paste this line into it:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i %1 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 0 -c:a pcm_s16le -map 0 -sn %1_proxy.mov

(requires ffmpeg.exe to be located in c:\window\system32 or you change the word ffmpeg to "c:\location_of\ffmpeg.exe")
Then, just drag and drop a file onto create_proxy.bat and it should encode a proxy and place the output file next to your input file but named ..._proxy.mov.

Also @Chahk Yet another option is that you just set premiere encoding profile to "match source", i just asked my trusted cutting professional and he showed me that in a recent version of premiere, in prores proxy profile you can set "match source" for all video properties


Let me know any doubts...
@failsafe5000, welcome to the forum too, thanks for your contribution!!