![]() With the future more firmly in mind, ProRes was created (in 2007) as a transcoding codec which balanced post-production needs and image quality, and it later grew into an acquisition and delivery codec. ![]() A clear description of just how much color information you’ll always throw away, (from Apple’s ProRes White Paper) For best quality, a format that supports at least 10-bit (1024 values for each channel) and 4:2:2 is needed, but many codecs are limited to 8-bit 4:2:0, even today. Better than 4:2:0 is 4:2:2, where there’s one chroma pixel for every two luminance pixels, and 4:4:4, with full 1:1 chroma resolution. ![]() 4:2:0 means that there’s one chroma pixel for every four luminance pixels, so a UHD image in 4:2:0 has the same amount of color information as a 1080p JPEG. If you’re not across the finer points of the technical details, 8-bit means that each channel has 256 (2^8) potential different values. I think frame size was limited to the 3 HD formats for HDV.” “It was 8-bit 4:2:0 which was OK for transcoding HDV, but not good enough for transcoding other higher quality formats. For example, on Avid Media Composer, you might choose AVR 12 for low quality, or AVR 77 for high.Īpple’s initial “mezzanine codec” solution for Final Cut Pro was the Apple Intermediate Codec, a performant, high-quality codec you could use as a neutral baseline. Each NLE also rolled their own codecs and depending on how much storage you needed, you made a trade-off between quality and file size. But DV wasn’t the main game in town, and if you were dealing with some other capture format, you might have to rely on a capture card and their proprietary codecs. Making basic DV and HDV edits was not too stressful for the Macs of the early 2000s, but if you wanted to create fancy effects or get into color correction, you might start to struggle. So where does ProRes fit into the story, and what’s its place in today’s video world? With the help of Steve Bayes, Product Manager of ProRes at its launch and for a decade afterwards, let’s dig into it. Fast forward a few years to DV, the iMac DV, then HDV, and the last twenty or so years have seen an explosion of codecs, cameras, formats and ever-increasing resolutions. In the era of VHS-to-VHS dubs, this was revelatory. That first version was simple enough - tiny postage-stamp videos of the birth of a child and the launch of an Apollo rocket could be copied and pasted to create something new. I remember seeing QuickTime 1.0 when I was a teenage nerd with a new Mac LC. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |