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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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so I've used it a few times, but it absolutely chokes on 4K footage on my rig. I think maybe the lack of hardware acceleration for pre rendering?
I have a big project coming up and I'm considering downscaling all the source files, editing, and then slipping in the real files when I'm done. Is that a thing people do?
I've been waiting ages for hardware acceleration to be fixed. It's a frustrating bug.
Yes, that's a built-in feature called proxy video. It makes lower resolution copies of the video files, you edit with them, it's a big load off your machine (and easier on RAM), you can render a low quality version from the proxy files for you or someone else on your team to preview for any last minute changes, then you can render out the entire thing from the original high res files.
She covers dealing with huge files on her shitty computer with proxy stuff in the video
sweet. On mobile. I'll have to check it out later.
This is literally how all professional editors work, the lower res is called the offline edit, then you swap the high res back in for 'onlining' and export.
Kdenlive has a built in feature to automatically create and use proxies for editing, it helps a ton. I did create a custom encoding profile for my proxies to be a bit higher quality.
Yep.
Yeh, either proxy editing (where it's low res versions until export).
Or you could try a more suitable intermediary codec.
I presume you are editing h.264 or something else with "temporal compression". Essentially there are a few full frames every second, and the other frames are stored as changes. Massively reduces file size, but makes random access expensive as hell.
Something like ProRes, DNxHD... I'm sure there are more. They store every frame, so decoding doesn't require loading the last full frame and applying the changes to the current frame.
You will end up with massive files (compared to h.264 etc), but they should run a lot better for editing.
And they are lossless, so you convert source footage then just work away.
Really high res projects will combine both of these. Proxy editing with intermediary codecs