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Remote proxy creation without Media Encoder

Hi everyone,

 

Here's something interesting that I wanted to share, for everyone here who edits video in Adobe Premiere (or otherwise) and creates proxies using Media Encoder.
I finally found a way to create proxies without Adobe Media Encoder, from my workstation BUT on a remote computer (thus not occupying my workstation) and this can be done in a distributed way too, meaning that multiple computers can work on the same set of proxies, so that it's done much faster!

I use ProRes in my projects, but you can probably do Cineform in the same way.
The core of this solution is a render manager software. There's a bunch of them out there, but I use Muster by Virtual Vertex (you can get a license for one node for $80).
Render managers are usually used for rendering for 3D software like Maya or 3Ds Max, but Muster works with FFmpeg as well.

So, I made a small app with Python (since Muster has Python API, but most of them do) that lets me drag the video files on my network storage drive and submit those files as FFmpeg jobs to the render manager to be executed on (what's now officially is) my Ingest Server.
The app is made to read information from each video file that afterwards Muster allows me to see in each file job from the comfort of my editing workstation.

After the proxies are created, I can find them in my Proxies folder on the same network storage drive as the footage and all that's left is to Attach them to my footage in Premiere.
It's too bad Adobe doesn't allow Media Encoder to work as a true server for transcoding video as Watch Folders are very limited, but now I know there's another way!

Hope you liked this idea... :)

Cheers!
-Sergey.

 

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UPDATE: After further testing and more customization of transcoding methods combining CPU and GPU...
This method proved to transcode Premiere proxies 25-30% faster than Media Encoder!!

Success on all fronts? I can't say it isn't... 😜 

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