ProRes

Apple ProRes is a family of lossy intra-frame video codecs developed by Apple and used as the de facto mezzanine standard for post-production workflows in editorial, color grading, VFX and finishing. The family includes ProRes 422 Proxy (very small, used for offline editing on laptops), ProRes 422 LT (lightweight, editorial proxies), ProRes 422 (standard, equivalent to Avid DNxHD 145), ProRes 422 HQ (mastering for HD), ProRes 4444 (12-bit with alpha channel, used for VFX and finishing), and ProRes 4444 XQ (extreme quality, used for ARRI Alexa primary capture in some workflows). Bit depth is 10-bit for the 422 family and 12-bit for the 4444 family; chroma subsampling is 4:2:2 for 422 variants and 4:4:4 for 4444 variants. Bitrates scale with resolution and target — at 4K UHD 30p, ProRes 422 HQ is roughly 884 Mbps and ProRes 4444 XQ is 1.9 Gbps. ProRes is intra-frame, meaning each frame is encoded independently, which makes it fast to seek, scrub and edit at the cost of larger files than long-GOP codecs like H.264. It is supported natively in Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer and Nuke. Apple publishes the official white paper at apple.com/quicktime/technologies/. ProRes RAW is a separate codec for raw bayer-pattern capture.