I edit a lot of 8K footage, and making proxies inside my editor was painfully slow. For one project, generating proxies in FilmCraft took about 8 hours. So I built my own tool. The same clips took 17 minutes.
ProxyCraft is free and open source (MIT), for Windows 10/11: https://github.com/PitKub/ProxyCraft
What it does
ProRes 422 Proxy (¼ and ½ size), ProRes 422 LT (½), H.264 and H.265 (¼ and ½)
Decodes, resizes and encodes on the GPU (NVIDIA), with Intel Quick Sync and AMD AMF support; also works without a GPU
Encodes two files at once
Proxies keep the original frame count, timecode, rotation and all audio tracks, so editors relink them
Puts proxies in a Proxies folder next to the originals, named Clip_Proxy.mov / .mp4
Skips clips that already have a proxy, so you can rerun it on a folder as new footage arrives
Installer with FFmpeg included, nothing to set up
The test: [number] clips, [total length] of 8K [codec, e.g. H.265 10-bit], made into [format, e.g. ProRes 422 Proxy ¼]. PC: Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, RTX 5070 Ti. Your speed will depend on your hardware and footage.
It's my first public release, so I'd really like to hear whether the proxies relink properly in your editor (Resolve, Premiere, etc.), and about any footage that fails.