Feature request: Low resolution proxy files for faster editing of high resolution content.

[LolicoreExpress]

What prompted me to open this request is that I have recently been making some webms out of 4K footage, and seeking through 4K was really slow even though I got some pretty beefy specs on my computer. Sometimes waiting multiple seconds on each click to seek. Same for resizing any subclip using the handles, that was painfully slow as well.
So yeah it made me wish there was an option to downscale the preview resolution down to something that my PC can easily handle like 1080p.
Sorry, I feel like I'm the only person asking for stuff 😅
I don't know if it's easily doable or even if others would be interested in this feature, but that's an idea.

[dfaker]

I think it's as far as it will go on that front, the optional fancy rendering is turned way down for the two embedded players, the idea of scaling down is already being done in a sense and is itself quite expensive on a per-frame basis but is being done at the lowest quality.

Other than looking at optionally generating a separate scaled down file 'surrogate file' and specifying timings on that (which would have to be a time-consuming re-encode itself) I'm not sure what can be done.

I do see the issue, as I'm running it at 1440p and editing 4k on occasion myself, do you think the annoyance of waiting 5 mins for a surrogate to render that allowed faster seeks would be worth it?

[LolicoreExpress]

Hmm I see, I didn't even think about that.

do you think the annoyance of waiting 5 mins for a surrogate to render that allowed faster seeks would be worth it?

Well... It would be worth it when one plans on making a lot of subclips. The time saved on smooth seeking would be worth the 5 minutes wait.
But I feel like I'm asking for a feature that would barely see any use, as it would imply the use of 4K footage (pretty rare) and making a lot of subclips (even rarer) for it to be worth.
I'd be happy to have such a feature available in the rare cases where I need it, but also it's not critically needed, so I guess it can be on the backburner for now 😊
I'd feel better about it if more people were asking for something like this.