I am currently beta testing a really cool application from Imagine Products. It’s called “ProxyMill” and what it does will save a lot of time and money.

ProxyMill will create timecoded “proxy” movies of any footage that you capture with FCP or any footage you copy off of a P2 card…automatically, in the background. All you have to do is tell it what folder to watch, and what folder to put the proxies in, then let it go.

First lets talk about how it makes movies from FCP. You tell the application what folder in the capture scratch folder to look for and then just start capturing video. When the new file appears (after it is done being captured) ProxyMill will begin to make lower res proxie in the folder you designate. They look like this:

This is the default setting of H.264 320×180 with 30 point text size. As you can see, the timecode does not cover the image at all, so you can see the entire picture.

One of the coolest things this does is make proxies from P2 cards and card dumps. When you dump a P2 card into your dump folder, ProxyMill will start making timecoded proxies of the card contents. Again, to the folder you designate, AND…I love this…AND to the PROXY folder of the P2 card. It won’t copy it to the proxy folder if it is locked, but if you unlock it, it can write to that folder. This way you have proxy video on all your archived backups.

What can you use this proxy for? Well, at the end of the shoot day you can copy all of these proxies to a hard drive to hand to the client or producer so they can see what was shot (They are working on iPod and iPhone presets too!) and use these for paper edits. You can also send these to transcription houses (verify what codecs they want) to have transcripts made.

This is a huge time and money saver. Saved time for you or the assistant editor stringing out the P2 footage onto the timeline, adding timecode and then exporting out as quicktimes. NO more wasted time and money making DVDs of all the footage for producers and transcription houses. The ability to send the client home with footage after the shoot day.

Keep an eye out for it in January.