ProRes — The Editing Master Format

Not for distribution. For working.

Apple ProRes is an intra-frame codec — every frame is a complete picture, no GOP, no temporal compression. That makes it heavy (10–20x bigger than H.264 at the same source) but trivially scrubbable in editors. ProRes is what you encode to before color grading, what you ingest from a camera, what you hand to Final Cut. Never what you upload.

The ProRes flavors

ProRes 422 Proxy (profile 0) — small, low-quality, for offline edits.
ProRes 422 LT (1) — light, ~70 Mbps for 1080p.
ProRes 422 (2) — standard, ~117 Mbps for 1080p.
ProRes 422 HQ (3) — high-quality, ~176 Mbps. The common 'master' choice.
ProRes 4444 (4) — adds alpha, 12-bit, ~264 Mbps. Compositing/VFX.
ProRes 4444 XQ (5) — even higher bitrate. Cinema delivery.

Color and pixel format

ProRes 422 expects yuv422p10le. ProRes 4444 wants yuva444p10le (with alpha) or yuv444p10le (without). Mismatched pixel formats either fail or silently downsample.

Code

Encode to ProRes for editing·bash

# Common 'edit master' — ProRes 422 HQ
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 \
  -vendor apl0 -bits_per_mb 8000 \
  -pix_fmt yuv422p10le \
  -c:a pcm_s16le \
  master.mov

# Lighter master (ProRes 422 standard)
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 2 \
  -pix_fmt yuv422p10le \
  -c:a pcm_s16le \
  master_422.mov

# Proxy for offline editing
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 0 \
  -vf scale=960:-2 \
  -pix_fmt yuv422p10le \
  -c:a pcm_s16le \
  proxy.mov

ProRes with alpha (transparent overlays)·bash

# ProRes 4444 with alpha for compositing
ffmpeg -i in_with_alpha.png \
  -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 4 \
  -pix_fmt yuva444p10le \
  out_alpha.mov

# Confirm alpha survived
ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \
  -show_entries stream=pix_fmt out_alpha.mov
# pix_fmt=yuva444p10le ← yes

ProRes — The Editing Master Format

Not for distribution. For working.

The ProRes flavors

Color and pixel format

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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