Every event I shoot generates footage from at least three cameras plus a drone card, and editing that natively on a laptop between flights is a good way to lose an afternoon to a spinning cursor. Proxies solved this for me years ago, but the workflow I use now is leaner than what I was doing even a year back, mostly because Premiere's ingest tools finally stopped fighting me.
Ingest with proxies from the start
I no longer import full-res footage and generate proxies afterward. Media Browser ingest with proxy creation turned on at import time means by the time I've finished labeling bins, half the footage already has a usable proxy sitting next to it. Quarter-resolution ProRes Proxy is still my default; anything higher and the export time savings start to disappear.
The setting that actually changed my life was letting Premiere use a background encoder process instead of blocking the main app. I can keep editing the first camera angle while cameras two and three are still transcoding in the background. It sounds obvious written down, but for years I just waited.
Where multi-cam still breaks
Multi-cam sync by audio waveform works maybe 85 percent of the time on my event footage, and the failures are almost always the same: a camera positioned too far from the PA system, or a generator running near one mic and not the others. When it fails, I don't fight the auto-sync. I drop a manual marker on a clean transient, usually applause or a door closing, and sync by hand. Faster than debugging why the algorithm picked the wrong offset.
- Quarter-res ProRes Proxy at ingest, always
- Background transcode on, so editing starts immediately
- Manual sync markers when audio sync fails, don't argue with the algorithm
The relink step nobody enjoys
Relinking to full-res before final export is still the most tedious part of this whole pipeline, and I haven't found a shortcut that doesn't occasionally miss a clip. My habit now is running a link-check pass the night before delivery, never the same day, because I want time to notice a missing relink before a client does.
None of this is glamorous. But an editing setup that stays responsive on a laptop in an airport lounge is worth more to my actual output than any color trick I could show you.