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Pro Res 422

Pro Res 422

All you need to know about Apple's exciting new Video Format.

Introduction

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For years true HD-quality images have been out of reach for most of the public. Formats like DVCPRO-HD and HDV have dominated the market, but they can be very unreliable with image quality that is not always up to snuff when transferred out of their native environment. As HD quality is advancing and becoming more prevalent, users require a format that goes far beyond both DVCPRO-HD and HDV.

Until now, the only means of guaranteeing pristine high-quality images has been with uncompressed HD. But the high bandwidth and storage requirements necessary for its use has kept this out of the price range of all but the largest studios and post-production houses.

Now there is an answer. Apple’s ProRes 422 provides the user with all the quality of uncompressed HD with data and storage rates lower than uncompressed Standard Definition Images. ProRes 422 gives performance equal to or better than existing codecs on Final Cut Pro while allowing users with slower drives and shared storage to work without any problems. The result is a format that fits seamlessly into the most demanding editing and effects workflows and ensures that every image is reproduced flawlessly on the screen.

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Key Features

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Stunning HD Quality

Quality Indistinguishable from the Most Pristine Sources - Maintains superb quality
even after multiple encoding/decoding generations.
Full-Width 1920-by-1080 and 1280-by-720 Resolution - Offers the highest visual
detail possible in any HD format.
4:2:2 Chroma Sampling - Provides precise compositing and blending at sharp
saturated-color boundaries.
10-Bit Sample Depth - Preserves subtle gradients of 10-bit sources (sunsets, graphics,
and the like) with no visible banding artifacts.
I Frame–Only Encoding - Ensures consistent quality in every frame and no artifacts
from complex motion.

Remarkably Low Data Rates

Variable Bit-Rate (VBR) Encoding - “Smart” encoding analyzes the image and allocates
more bits to complex frames. Effciency is increased because excess bits are not wasted
on simple frames.
Two Target HD Bit Rates - Normal quality is targeted at 145 Mbps, and high quality
(HQ) is targeted at 220 Mbps. Except in the case of unusually complex material, actual
bit rates are typically 5 to 10 percent lower than these targets.
Low Bit Rates Increase Equipment Affordability - You can edit more streams with
more real-time effects on slower drives, or have more users accessing the same
media over Xsan. And performance increases as you increase the speed of your
storage infrastructure.
- ProRes 422 produces video indistinguishable from uncompressed HD that needs
  less storage space than uncompressed SD video. If you have been waiting to jump
  into high-quality HD editing because of the costs of storage and archiving, this is
  an opportunity for new business without the added cost of new equipment.
- Even MacBook Pro laptops can use ProRes 422 to play back full-quality HD in
  real time. Attach a 23-inch or 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display—or even a high resolution projector—and play back high-quality HD in the field during the shoot or at a client’s screening room.

Designed for Speed

Excellent Full-Size and Blazing 1/2-by-1/2-Size Decoding Speed - For more effects and
more streams in everyday editing, ProRes 422 is perfectly suited for the Dynamic RT
capability in Final Cut Pro.
Impressive Encoding Speed - Capture ProRes 422 in real time from any HD-SDI source.

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Benefits for Final Cut Pro Editing and Video I/O

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Capture

Using Apple ProRes 422 on a Mac Pro equipped with an HD-SDI video card, users can
capture the highest-quality, full-width, 10-bit, 4:2:2 HD video from any HD-SDI source,
including HD tape decks, broadcast feeds, direct recording from a camera’s HD-SDI
output, telecine devices, and so on. The ProRes 422 software encoder compresses the
incoming video frames and writes them to a QuickTime fi le on a standard hard drive.

Users may select either the ProRes 422 or ProRes 422 HQ quality setting. Both settings
feature HD quality that is indistinguishable from the original, even after many generations
of reencoding. Normal ProRes 422 provides excellent preservation of either 8-bit
or 10-bit source quality at an economical bit rate. ProRes 422 HQ offers even greater
headroom to preserve the quality of even the most demanding, complex material
with no visible artifacts.

HD-SDI video sources captured to normal-quality ProRes 422, or even to ProRes 422
HQ, will occupy less disk space than uncompressed standard-defi nition video. Yet, for
virtually all practical purposes, the quality of HD ProRes 422 will be visually equivalent
to that of uncompressed HD.

Apple ProRes 422 is also ideal for capturing and preserving not only 8-bit, but also
10-bit SD sources. It captures either bit depth at data rates similar to DVCPRO-50
and IMX-50, which support 8-bit depth only.

Transcoding

Some of the new-generation camcorders use sophisticated new codecs for recording
to flash memory, a hard drive, or other internal storage media. One example is the
RED ONE Digital Cinema camera, which employs wavelet compression to reduce the
data rate of 4:4:4 4K/24p RAW image sequences to rates around 200 Mbps. Another is
Panasonic’s P2 AVC-Intra format, which uses H.264 intraframe compression to reduce
full-width, 10-bit, 4:2:2 1080i60 or 720p60 HD sequences to just 100 Mbps.

New codec formats such as these can be ideal for compressing and preserving such
high-quality source imagery at data rates low enough for internal camcorder storage.
However, some of these new codecs are too complex to achieve the software decoding
speeds needed to support the level of multistream real-time editing performance
that Final Cut Pro users have come to expect.

Apple ProRes 422 provides an excellent means of handling these new formats by fully
preserving every aspect of their native quality in a format engineered for superb multistream
Final Cut Pro real-time performance. In fact, ProRes 422 provides an excellent
solution for any video format that does not have native Final Cut Pro support.

Real-Time Playback

Once material has been encoded from an HD-SDI source or transcoded from another
format to Apple ProRes 422, users can take advantage of the codec’s exceptional
real-time playback performance. As Final Cut Pro users know, a project’s timeline can
be set for real-time playback at different levels of video quality.

At high-quality real-time playback, Final Cut Pro displays video and effects at full
resolution. Medium-quality playback shows video at half its full dimensions, to
reserve CPU power for more video streams and effects. Apple ProRes 422 has been
engineered for excellent decoding speed at full-resolution playback, but provides
exceptionally fast speed at 1/2-by-1/2 size. This latter mode provides tremendous
value to users for practical editing productivity.

Rendering

Although native editing of HDV and XDCAM HD formats with Final Cut Pro is popular
and has many advantages, ProRes 422 can still bring signifi cant benefi ts to the rendering
process. Because long GOP formats are complex and highly compressed, rendering
tends to be slow and may reduce the quality headroom present in the stream. Through
a new user preference in Final Cut Pro 6.0, the editor can choose to render effects in
HDV and XDCAM HD using ProRes 422. This will result in faster rendering time and a
higher-quality 4:2:2 composite. For projects that are mastering to HD-SDI, ProRes 422
is the perfect rendering choice.

Video Output

ProRes 422 can take advantage of third-party video I/O devices to output a true 10-bit
signal over HD-SDI. Choose the video card as the output choice, and ProRes 422 plays
back in real time from the Final Cut Pro timeline to any HD-SDI tape deck. Because the
decoding speed of ProRes 422 is superior to that of many other formats, encoding to
distribution formats such as H.264 for the web or MPEG-2 for DVD can be faster even
than uncompressed HD. This decoding advantage also means that ProRes 422 has the
potential to be used on servers to play out multiple simultaneous HD-SDI streams.

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