Make Proxy

Make Proxy is the most boring node in ComfyTV, and it might save you the most time. Video editing gets sluggish not because your effects are heavy but because your NLE is trying to scrub raw 4K frames in real time. The professional answer is proxies - small, fast-to-decode preview copies that stand in for the real footage while you work, with the full-res version swapped back in at render. This stage builds exactly that: point it at a video and it returns a lightweight proxy.

ComfyTV is the canvas-style app layer on ComfyUI where every operation is its own node. Make Proxy is part of the Video editing infrastructure - the README calls it "proxy generation with transparent proxy playback," meaning ComfyTV can silently work on proxies while you edit and render from the originals.

How it works. Give it a source video (video input - it's literally the /view URL of the source), and the node transcodes it into a small, fast proxy and hands back a new video URL. There are no quality sliders and no clever parameters, because the whole point is that you don't make decisions here - you just get a lighter version to edit against. The proxy output feeds any downstream stage (color, FX, edit), and because the proxy is transparent to the pipeline, you keep your full-res original for the final render.

The inputs that matter. Just one, and it's not even the usual internal plumbing: video is the source /view URL to build the preview proxy for. If it's empty, the node errors with "Make Proxy needs a source video URL." The output is proxy, a COMFYTV_VIDEO.

That's the whole node. It's a utility, not a creative tool - which is exactly why it's worth knowing about: it's the thing you reach for when your ComfyTV timeline starts dragging on heavy footage.

Install. Install the pack once:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jtydhr88/ComfyTV

Restart ComfyUI (a real backend restart, not a browser refresh) and the stage appears under ComfyTV → Video. ComfyUI Manager - search "ComfyTV" - works too. Zero Python dependencies (the pack's pyproject.toml dependency list is empty) and no model files - it's a transcode, not an inference. The usual install trap applies: on Desktop or multi-install setups, clone into the running instance's path from the startup log or the node never shows up.

Where people get burned. Honestly, not much to get wrong here - it's the rare node with one input. The main confusion is expecting it to replace your footage; it doesn't, it generates a proxy alongside it, and you keep the original wired for the final export. If the node errors, it's almost always an empty or stale video URL - re-wire the upstream output. And a genuinely useful habit: run Make Proxy early in a heavy pipeline (long 4K clips, multi-clip edits) rather than after you've already stacked a dozen FX stages - the proxy makes everything downstream faster, and the original still renders in full quality at the end.