ProRes Proxy
Also known as: ProRes 422 Proxy, proxy ProRes
The lightest tier of ProRes, made for editing rather than for quality, small enough to cut on hardware that cannot handle the originals.
Updated
What it means
It is the bottom of the ProRes range. The same codec family and the same ease of decoding, at a data rate low enough that an ordinary laptop handles several streams at once without complaint.
Quality is deliberately reduced. A proxy is for deciding what goes where, and the originals come back for the grade and the export, which is the whole arrangement working the way it was designed to.
That makes it the standard answer to Proxy editing. Generate once, edit comfortably, relink at the end, and the only real requirement of the whole arrangement is that the relink actually happens.
How it works in practice
Generation is a background job. Most applications create proxies on import and then swap between them and the originals with a single setting, which is the entire point of the feature.
Naming and folders matter. Proxies that live beside the originals with matching file names relink reliably, and a tidy structure is what makes Relinking media uneventful.
It is the honest choice for long action footage. An hour of 4K edits smoothly as a proxy and painfully as camera files on anything but the most recent hardware, which is most people machines.
What to watch out for
Exporting from proxies is the classic mistake. The result looks soft and nobody notices until it is published, which is a Transcode failure of a different kind: the render succeeded and produced the wrong thing.
Disk space doubles. Proxies sit alongside the originals rather than replacing them, so a project needs room for both and a drive that was perfectly adequate is suddenly nowhere near enough.
Effects applied at proxy resolution can behave differently at full size. A crop or a stabilisation pass judged on a proxy needs checking again once the originals are back in place.
How RawClip handles it
Proxies are an editing convenience rather than something the analysis needs, so uploading the originals is the right choice and avoids a generation step entirely. A proxy uploaded by mistake produces a result noticeably softer than the original footage deserved.