Tip #483: Adobe Supports ProRes on Mac and Windows
… for Codecs & Media
Tip #483: Adobe Supports ProRes on Mac and Windows
Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com
Adobe announced full support for ProRes on Windows.
At the start of 2019, Adobe announced expanded support for ProRes, on both their Mac and Windows software. Here’s the link. ProRes has long been popular on Mac-based editing systems, including those from Adobe. But, its support on Windows has been much weaker. That changed with this announcement from Adobe.
Apple ProRes is a codec technology developed by Apple for high-quality, high-performance editing. It is one of the most popular codecs in professional post-production and is widely used for acquisition, production, delivery, and archive. Adobe has worked with Apple to provide ProRes export to post-production professionals using Premiere Pro and After Effects. Support for ProRes on macOS and Windows helps streamline video production and simplifies final output, including server-based remote rendering with Adobe Media Encoder.
With the latest Adobe updates, ProRes 4444 and ProRes 422 export is available within Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder on macOS and Windows 10.
This is hardly a tip (though I suppose good to know for Windoze-based editors who hadn’t yet realized they could play ProRes); but mostly reads like a press release. WHY is ProRes so useful and popular (besides taking up more storage space, which I’m sure storage manufacturers love); WHAT does it streamline, especially since we’re all (in television, at least) exporting high-rate h264s? HOW do I achieve any economies by transcoding my assets after the fact to ProRes? I realize that this amount of info is beyond the scope of a “tip”, but I just don’t get it…at my facility, by the time I’d be done transcoding to PR, I could have simply used whatever mp4s I got and finished the edit.
Mike:
More blog than press release, actually. The big advantage to ProRes, on both Mac and Windows, is its editing efficiency. Unlike highly compressed codecs such as H.264 or HEVC, ProRes stores every frame complete. This means no deconstruction during editing, nor the need for massing GPUs for decompression. As well, ProRes is 10-bit, which supports smoother gradients and more efficient color correction and other effects which alter the gray-scale values of a pixel.
Shoot whatever format your camera supports, but transcoding to ProRes, or DNxHR, or Cineform will speed your edits due to their inherent compression structure.
Larry