Technical

What "Proxy" Means When the Draft Is a Local Generation and the Final Is a Cloud One

20 September 2026 · RenderBob team

A camera proxy and its original are the same shot at two fidelities. A local generative draft and a later cloud generation are two separate takes, and the second can change the picture.

Traditional proxy editing is a settled pattern. Camera originals stay put. The editor makes lighter stand-ins at a lower bitrate or resolution. You cut against those, and export reconnects to the full-resolution files. A timeline that drafts a clip on a fast local model and later regenerates it on a heavier cloud model rhymes with that pattern. It is a different substitution.

A proxy relink upgrades fidelity. A new generation can change the shot

A proxy and its original are the same footage. Framing, timing, and content match. Compression is what changes. A local draft and a cloud final of the same prompt are two generations. They can come from different models, different seeds, and different readings of the reference. Reference drift, covered earlier in this series, means the cloud pass can move composition and timing instead of simply drawing the approved draft more sharply.

The old proxy mistakes have generative cousins

Proxy guides warn about three quiet failures: an aspect-ratio mismatch that corrupts the export, colour tags lost in the transcode so a colourist grades against the wrong reference, and an export that ships the proxy because nobody switched back. Each has a generative version. A local draft at one aspect ratio needs a flag if the cloud final is meant for another. A local model's colour and tone can differ from the cloud model's, so a review of the draft is not a review of the final look. The sharpest version of shipping the proxy is delivering the local drafts because a finalise step never ran, and the pictures may not even be the shots that were approved.

Analogy with documented proxy-editing failure modes, not a report of a named project.

The timeline has to show which version you are looking at

Proxy workflows survive on a visible state: you can see whether the viewer is on the proxy or the original, and export cannot silently pick the wrong one. A generative draft needs a stronger version of that. Every clip should say whether it is a local draft or a confirmed final. Promoting a clip should be a deliberate action, with a look at the new generation before it replaces the approved draft. Convenience without that check is how a studio ships a cloud pass nobody compared to the picture the client signed.

RenderBob treats local and cloud as a per-clip choice on the timeline. The draft and the final stay distinct until someone promotes the shot.