ProRes is Apple's professional intra-only video codec family — the de-facto standard for editing, mastering and archive in much of the film, broadcast and post-production industry. Released in 2007 alongside Final Cut Pro, ProRes was designed specifically for editing workflows: every frame is encoded independently (intra-only), so a colourist or editor can scrub frame-by-frame, cut anywhere, apply effects, and re-export multiple times without accumulating quality loss. The price is large files — many times the size of streaming H.264 — but for production, that's exactly the right trade-off.
The family has six tiers. ProRes 422 Proxy (~45 Mbps at 1080p) is for offline editing on low-power hardware. ProRes 422 LT is ~70 % of standard 422's bitrate. ProRes 422 (~145 Mbps at 1080p) is the most common online-editing format. ProRes 422 HQ (~220 Mbps) preserves visual quality at the same level as 4444 but in 4:2:2 colour. ProRes 4444 (~330 Mbps) is the mastering tier — 4:4:4:4 colour with an alpha channel for compositing. ProRes 4444 XQ (~500 Mbps) is the highest tier, designed to preserve HDR detail at the highest dynamic ranges. All variants support 10-bit and 12-bit colour and are mathematically lossless at the alpha channel.
For a product team, ProRes is what masters arrive as — from cinematographers, post-production houses, broadcast facilities, professional Mac-based studios. The standard pipeline: receive ProRes master, transcode to delivery codecs (H.264 / HEVC / AV1) for streaming, keep the ProRes master in archival storage. Modern iPhone Pro models also record ProRes directly, so user-generated content from prosumer creators may arrive as ProRes too. Pure delivery never uses ProRes — files are too large — but it's the most common production-side format your ingest pipeline will encounter.
