A wedding weekend now routinely produces more data than a feature film's dailies. Two or three bodies shooting 4K, a couple of prime-lens B-roll cards, a drone, and a gimbal operator who never stopped rolling: it is normal to come home with 700 GB of media for a single Saturday. Then you drop it on a timeline and the playhead stutters, the scrub is mush, and a three-minute highlight takes an afternoon to assemble.
Proxies fix that. They are the least glamorous part of a wedding post-production workflow and the one that most reliably buys back a day per wedding. And when you outsource the edit, proxies stop being a comfort feature and become an infrastructure decision: they determine what you upload, how fast your editor starts, and whether the final render comes back at full quality or quietly at 1080p.
This guide covers the proxy decision end to end — what to record in camera, what to generate at ingest, how to name and store it, and what to actually send to an editor who is not sitting in your room.
What a proxy is, and what it is not
A proxy is a small, easy-to-decode duplicate of a camera file that stands in for the original while you cut, and steps aside when you render. The edit is a list of timecodes and clip names; it does not care which version of the picture the software is showing you. That is the whole trick.
Two properties make a file a good proxy. First, it is intra-frame or lightly compressed enough that the computer can jump to any frame instantly, instead of decoding a run of frames to reach the one you asked for. Second, it is small enough that a normal drive can feed several streams at once — which is what multicam and layered timelines demand.
Three things a proxy is not. It is not a lower-quality deliverable: the final export comes from the original media, and if it does not, something has gone wrong. It is not a backup: a proxy is derived data and belongs nowhere in your 3-2-1 count. And it is not a substitute for a colour-managed grade — a proxy encoded from log footage still looks flat, which is why a display LUT belongs alongside the proxy rather than baked into it.
The mental model that keeps this straight: originals are the negative, proxies are the work print, and the timeline is the edit decision list that connects the two. Every proxy problem you will ever have is a broken connection between those three things.
Why proxies matter more the moment you outsource
When you cut in-house, proxies are a performance choice. You could work natively on a fast machine, accept the stutter, and still deliver. When you hand the footage to someone else, three new constraints appear at once.
The first is transfer. Your editor cannot start until the media arrives, and media volume is the single biggest variable in when that happens. The second is hardware asymmetry: you do not control your editor's machine, their drive speed, or their decode support for the exact HEVC variant your camera writes. The third is version discipline — with two people touching the project, "which media is this timeline linked to" becomes a question that has to have a documented answer rather than a remembered one.
Proxies address all three, but only if the decision is made before the cards are offloaded. Retrofitting proxies after you have already uploaded 700 GB saves nothing. Making the call at ingest — as part of the same pass that copies, verifies and backs up the cards — is the difference between a proxy workflow and a proxy afterthought. That is also the natural moment to settle the rest of the handoff, which we cover in the guide to sending wedding footage to your editor.
It is worth being precise about what "waiting" costs, because it is easy to underestimate. A single Saturday across three cameras plus drone and audio recorders commonly lands between 400 GB and 1 TB. On a 100 Mbit/s upload — a good residential connection, not a bad one — 500 GB takes roughly eleven hours of continuous transfer, assuming nothing drops. That is a full working day between the offload finishing and the editor opening a timeline, and it happens on every wedding, every week of the season.
There is a scheduling argument too. Generating proxies is unattended, machine-time work. It happens overnight while you sleep, on the same night you are backing up anyway. Uploading full-resolution media is also unattended — but it is unattended time your editor spends waiting rather than working, and in peak season the queue is what costs you money.
None of this requires new equipment. Proxy generation runs on the machine you already offload with, and in most cases it runs alongside the backup rather than after it. The cost is disk space and a decision made once.
Choosing a proxy codec: ProRes Proxy, DNx LB or H.264
There are only three serious families of proxy codec, and the choice is mostly determined by what your editor's software and hardware do well rather than by any quality argument.
Apple ProRes 422 Proxy is the most conservative choice. Apple documents its target data rate as approximately 45 Mbps at 1920x1080 and 29.97 fps — the lowest tier of the ProRes family, sitting below ProRes 422 LT at roughly 102 Mbps and ProRes 422 at roughly 147 Mbps. It is intra-frame, decodes cheaply on almost any modern machine, and every professional NLE reads it.
Avid's low-bandwidth tier, DNxHR LB, is the Avid-native equivalent, and it runs on macOS and Windows alike. It is the proxy level of the DNx family, intended explicitly to be replaced by higher-quality media during finishing. Avid also consolidated the DNxHD and DNxHR names under a unified DNx naming scheme in Media Composer 2025.12, announced in January 2026, so expect to see both old and new labels in application menus for a while.
H.264 and HEVC proxies are the small-file option. They are inter-frame codecs, so scrubbing is less responsive than an intra-frame proxy on the same machine, but hardware decoders are now good enough that many editors do not notice on 1080p files — and the storage saving is large.
The practical rule: if you and your editor are both on Apple silicon, ProRes 422 Proxy costs you storage and buys you responsiveness. If files have to cross the internet before anyone can work, H.264 or HEVC at 1080p is the correct trade. If you are unsure, ask the editor — the answer takes one message and it is their machine that has to play the files.
One quality note that matters for weddings specifically. Apple's Final Cut Pro documentation flags that ProRes 422 Proxy is required rather than optional when the source is HDR or ProRes RAW; H.264 proxies are for SDR projects and SDR sources. If you shoot HLG for a couple who will watch on a phone, that distinction is not academic.
Recording proxies in camera on the wedding day
Most current cinema-style cameras can write a proxy alongside the main file at record time, and it is close to free. Nothing is transcoded later, nothing occupies your machine overnight, and the proxy exists the instant the card comes out.
Sony's implementation is a good reference because the specification is published in full. On the FX3, Proxy Settings offers a Proxy Recording toggle, a Proxy File Format choice and a Proxy Rec. Settings bit-rate choice. XAVC HS HD writes 1920x1080 HEVC at 16 Mbps or 9 Mbps in 4:2:0 10-bit; XAVC S HD writes 1280x720 H.264 at 6 Mbps in 4:2:0 8-bit. Both cap at 59.94p or 50p.
Three caveats from the same documentation are worth knowing before you rely on this at a ceremony. Proxy recording is unavailable when the record frame rate is set to 119.88p or 100p, and in slow-motion or quick-motion recording it is unavailable when the S&Q record frame rate is 119.88p or 100p or the S&Q frame rate is 120fps or 100fps. Your high-frame-rate passes therefore arrive without proxies; slower S&Q settings still generate them. The camera will not play proxy files back in-body. And deleting or protecting a clip acts on the original and the proxy together — you cannot protect one without the other.
That last point is the reason in-camera proxies are convenient rather than sufficient. They are locked to the camera's naming, they exist only for the clips the camera recorded, and they do not cover audio recorder files, drone media, or anything a second shooter brought on a different system. In practice, in-camera proxies get you a same-night selects pass and a fast review reel; a consistent, project-wide proxy set still comes from ingest.
If you shoot with mixed bodies, treat in-camera proxies as a bonus rather than the plan. A proxy set where two cameras have 1080p HEVC files and a third has nothing is worse than no proxies at all, because it hides the gap until someone is mid-edit.
Generating proxies at ingest: Premiere, Resolve and Final Cut
Every major NLE will build proxies for you, attach them automatically, and let you flip between proxy and full resolution with a single control. The mechanics differ enough to be worth spelling out.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Premiere handles this through Ingest settings. Adobe's documentation describes generating proxies on ingest so they are automatically associated with the native full-resolution media, with a single click to toggle between full-resolution and proxy. The ingest options include Create Proxies, which builds and attaches lower-resolution clips for editing performance and can be switched back to the original full-resolution files for final output, and Copy and Create Proxies, which copies the media and builds proxies in the same pass. Adobe's documentation is explicit that Premiere uses full-resolution media when exporting by default, even with proxies enabled; exporting from proxies is something you have to opt into in the export settings. The Toggle Proxies button affects what you watch, not what you deliver.
Proxies you have already made elsewhere can be attached after the fact. In the Project panel, the context menu for video or A/V clips and bins exposes a Proxy submenu with Create Proxies, Attach Proxies and Reconnect Full Resolution Media. That path is how you use camera-recorded proxies inside Premiere instead of transcoding a second set.
DaVinci Resolve
Resolve exposes proxy resolution as a fraction of the original — Original, Half, Quarter and smaller. Read that carefully: the fractions refer to one dimension, so Half of UHD is 1920x1080, which is a quarter of the pixel count. For offline cutting and audio work, ProRes 422 Proxy on Mac or DNxHR LB on Windows is the conventional pairing.
Resolve also ships the Blackmagic Proxy Generator, a standalone application that installs alongside Resolve. The free version comes as Proxy Generator Lite, which relies on the codecs built into your operating system rather than Resolve Studio's own set — so ProRes proxies are disabled on Windows in the Lite build. It runs outside Resolve, monitors watch folders, and transcodes new files automatically as they appear, writing proxies into a Proxy subfolder inside the original media folder so Resolve links them automatically on import. For a wedding videographer this is the closest thing to set-and-forget: point it at your offload destination before you go to bed, and the proxies build themselves while the backup runs.
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut transcodes proxies to either ProRes 422 Proxy or H.264, at frame sizes from 12.5 percent to 100 percent of the original, either during import or afterwards via Transcode Media. Transcoding happens as a background task, so the library is usable while it runs.
Apple's own warning deserves repeating because it is the single most common proxy accident: if you use proxy media for playback, switch back to optimized or original media before sharing the project. A film exported from proxies is a film delivered at proxy quality.
Folder structure and naming that survives relinking
Relinking failures are not really software failures. They are naming failures that only become visible when the software asks a question it cannot answer: which original does this proxy correspond to?
The rule that prevents nearly all of them is boring. A proxy keeps the base filename of its original and differs only in extension and location. Not a suffix, not a date, not "_proxy_v2_FINAL". If the original is A001_C014_0621XR.MP4, the proxy is A001_C014_0621XR.mov in a parallel folder. Every automatic relink mechanism in every NLE is built on that assumption, and every manual afternoon spent reconnecting clips is the result of breaking it.
Camera-original filenames are usually unique per card but not per project. Two bodies both starting at C0001 will collide the moment you flatten folders. Solve it at offload with a per-camera folder, not by renaming files after proxies exist.
One more discipline that pays off across a season: decide once, write it down, and use the same structure for every wedding. An editor who has done three of your weddings should be able to open the fourth without a single orientation question. That consistency is worth more than any individual optimisation, and it is the same argument behind agreeing an NLE and handoff convention with your editor before the season starts rather than during it.
Proxy-only handoff versus sending the full card dump
Here is where the proxy decision becomes a business decision. If your editor can cut on proxies, you may not need to send the originals at all until the grade — or ever, depending on how the finishing is split.
Three models exist in practice. In a full-resolution handoff, you send everything and the editor works and finishes natively. In a proxy-first handoff, you send proxies immediately and the originals in the background, so the editor starts hours instead of days after the wedding. In a proxy-only handoff, the editor cuts on proxies and returns a project file or timeline, and the conform, grade and export happen on your machine against the originals.
Proxy-first is the default worth adopting. It removes the upload from the critical path without changing anything about who does what, and it is invisible to the couple. Proxy-only is a stronger claim: it keeps your originals on your drives, which some videographers care about for client-confidentiality reasons, but it means you own the conform, and a conform that fails on a Friday night is your problem alone.
If you go proxy-only, agree the return format in writing before the footage moves. An XML or AAF that references proxy filenames will relink to originals cleanly if — and only if — the naming rule above was honoured. This is also the point where multicam preparation pays for itself, because a returned timeline built on synced angles conforms far more predictably than one built on manually aligned clips. The multicam sync guide covers what to do before the handoff rather than after it.
Where proxy workflows break, and how to prevent it
Proxy failures cluster into a short list. Every one of them is cheaper to prevent at ingest than to diagnose at midnight.
The most expensive is exporting from proxies. It produces a technically valid file at the wrong resolution, and it usually survives your own QC because the film plays correctly. Build a fixed check into your delivery routine: before every export, confirm the timeline is on full-resolution media, and after every export, confirm the file's resolution and bitrate in a media inspector rather than by eye.
The second is variable frame rate source media, typically from phones and some action cameras. VFR files transcoded to a constant-rate proxy drift against their originals, and the drift is invisible for the first thirty seconds and obvious by the end of a speech. Convert VFR to constant frame rate at ingest, before proxies are generated, and treat the converted file as the master for that clip.
The third is a baked-in LUT. A proxy with a display LUT burned in is a proxy that cannot be graded from and, more subtly, one that misleads the editor about what the shot contains in the highlights. Send the LUT as a file alongside the proxies and let the editor apply it as a viewer transform.
A note on storage arithmetic, because it makes the trade concrete. A constant bitrate in megabits per second multiplied by 0.45 gives roughly gigabytes per hour of footage. ProRes 422 Proxy at 45 Mbps is therefore about 20 GB per hour; a 9 Mbps HEVC proxy is about 4 GB per hour; a 6 Mbps 720p proxy is about 2.7 GB per hour. Run the same multiplication against your camera's record bitrate and the ratio is usually somewhere between five and forty to one. That ratio is exactly how much upload time a proxy-first handoff removes from your turnaround, and it is the reason proxies belong in your sales conversation and not just your workflow.
Wedding video proxy workflow: frequently asked questions
Do I need proxies if I shoot 4K on an M-series Mac?
Often not for a single-camera edit, and almost always yes for multicam. A modern Apple silicon machine plays one stream of most 4K codecs comfortably, but a four-angle ceremony sequence asks for four simultaneous decodes plus effects, and that is where native playback collapses. The other reason stands regardless of your hardware: if you outsource, proxies are about transfer time and your editor's machine, neither of which your Mac improves.
What resolution should wedding proxies be?
1080p is the default that works for almost every wedding edit. It is large enough to judge focus, expression and framing, and small enough to move quickly. Drop to 720p only when upload bandwidth is the binding constraint, and understand the trade: at 720p it becomes genuinely hard to tell a slightly soft shot from a sharp one, which is the judgement your editor most needs to make during selects.
How much storage do proxies add to a wedding?
Multiply the proxy bitrate in Mbps by 0.45 to get gigabytes per hour. Eight hours of coverage across three cameras is roughly 24 hours of footage; at a 9 Mbps HEVC proxy that is about 100 GB, and at ProRes 422 Proxy it is closer to 480 GB. Both are a small fraction of the originals, and both are disposable — you can delete a proxy set the day the film is delivered and regenerate it later if a couple asks for a re-edit.
Can my editor grade from proxies?
No, and they should not try. A proxy carries far less tonal headroom than the original, so grading decisions made on one — particularly in highlights and shadows — do not hold up when the same grade lands on full-resolution media. It is not that the grade fails to transfer; it is that you cannot judge it accurately on a file with crushed shadows, no highlight recovery and visible banding. The workable pattern is that the editor cuts and roughs in a look on proxies, and the grade is finished against full-resolution media — either by the editor once the originals arrive, or by you if you are running a proxy-only handoff. If you want a specific look, the way to communicate it is a written brief and reference stills, as set out in the colour grade brief guide.
What happens if I accidentally export from proxies?
You get a film at proxy resolution and bitrate that plays fine and looks soft on anything larger than a phone. The fix is to switch the timeline to full-resolution media and re-export; the edit itself is unaffected, because the timeline never referenced picture quality in the first place. The cost is the render time and, if you have already delivered, an awkward message to the couple — which is why a two-line pre-export check is worth building into your delivery routine permanently.
Should I send proxies or originals to a white-label editor?
Send proxies first and originals in the background unless your partner tells you otherwise. It removes the upload from the critical path, gets a first assembly moving on the same day the footage is offloaded, and costs you nothing you were not already doing at ingest. Confirm the codec, the resolution and the naming convention in one message before the first upload, and that agreement will hold for every wedding after it.