I'm surprised people working with professional footage don't have better tools for that but fair enough.

Oh, there definitely are better tools out there, I’m just saying where the source material is coming from. Transcoding specific apps are relatively far and few between, so we end up having to use use other apps for this at times. Handbrake, ffmpeg, Apple’s Compression (is it still alive?), Adobe Media Encoder, etc. Having to use DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Medi Composer, etc to create proxies or flip between formats is overkill and time consuming.

>Apple’s Compression (is it still alive?)

Yes. Why wouldn't it be?

I haven’t been on Apple’s site in a long while (or on a Mac). Wasn’t sure how Compression and Motion were faring since FCPX came out.

FCPX has been going from strength to strength since the release, with a constant stream of big updates, and winning lots of hearts back from the FCPX backslash.

This is also interesting: https://offthetracksmovie.com/

(Interesting factoid: the same person spearheaded and designed all of FCP, FCPX, and Premiere)