Is Apple ProRes 422 the best choice for a HD film?

[Russell Lasson]

I’m with Alex. What’s the original format of the source?

If it’s a digital cinema camera (Alexa, RED, etc) then I go with mastering to ProRes 4444 or ProRes HQ.

If the source is a camera that uses a more compressed codec (DSLR, XDCAM, etc) I generally use ProRes SQ.

That said, I’m not sure I know of anyone that would watch your film at a festival and say, “Boy, you should have used ProRes HQ!”

So questions you should answer are:

1. What was the acquisition codec?
2. What was the post production codec and workflow?
3. How with the festival show your film? Just because you have it at 2K doesn’t mean that they can screen it at 2K. They might only have 1080P equipment. And if you give them ProRes, they might even just make a Bluray or something for the festival.

Russ

Russell Lasson
Colorist/Digital Cinema Specialist
Color Mill
Salt Lake City, UT
http://www.colormill.net

[Andrew Rendell]

I might point out that I’m in PAL land and things are different in PAL compared to NTSC. This is a scan from Sony’s old technical manual for the DVW-A500P:

The move to 10 bit is more recent than my changing to hardly ever touching tape any more, in the ’90s I don’t recall anything being originated in 10 bit so the 10 bit signal going down the 270mbps SDI connection was always upconverted from 8 bit.

[Rafael Amador]

Andrew,
That is nothing related to PAL or NTSC.
By 1994/5 we have all the AD converters 10b-YUV in PAL land. That was already the broadcast standard for A/D conversion. 8b A/D was not Broadcast.

Here is the full paper of that desk. Scroll to the last page:
https://www.thameside.tv/product_PDFs/DVW-A500P.pdf

As you can see : Video/Audio performance > Digital Video > Quantization: 10b/Sample.

That the desk had a substandard 8b ANALOGUE COMPONENTS to DIGITAL (for direct BetacamSP input), doesn’t means that the Digital Betacam format is not 10b/YUV, and the tapes recorded in camera or in the desk when properly feed (SDI) are not 10b.
Probably SONY was selling apart an optional proper 10b board for Components analoge.
The paper mention an optional COMPOSITE to DIGITAL board, but don’t even mention the bit depth.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Andrew Rendell]

[Rafael Amador] “By 1994/5 we have all the AD converters 10b-YUV in PAL land. That was already the broadcast standard for A/D conversion. 8b A/D was not Broadcast.”

Well, you might have done, WE didn’t. OTOH I was mainly cutting sport fast-turnaround for auntie at the time and we used whatever we were given. Broadcast spec where I was working in the ’90s was “D1”, i.e., 8 bit as specified in ITU-R Rec 601, black on 16, white on 235, etc (we might have been using 10 bit signals but IMO they weren’t really 10 bit video until the picture sources became 10 bit origination and that was later).

Really IABMCTT and rather ancient history now anyway (it’s well over a decade since I moved to non-linear workstations).

🙂