A group of codecs developed by Apple for editing SD and HD video at a fraction of uncompressed file sizes and data rates. These codecs became available with the release of Final Cut Studio 2 (Final Cut Pro 6). Apple touts this format as maintaining extremely high quality, "indistinguishable from the original", so depending on the specific variation used, can be used for offline editing or for high quality online mastering. In HD, all the ProRes codecs supports full raster 16x9 frame sizes (1920x1080 and 1280x720). The format uses VBR (variable bit rate encoding) to provide efficient compression and to allow for higher data rates for complex detail. It uses spatial compression and no temporal compression (referred to as I-frame video). Support for multiple streams of real time effects.

With the release of Final Cut Studio 3, there are now 5 variations of this format:

• Apple ProRes 422 Proxy: highly compressed, data rate under 45Mb/sec, good for offline editing
• Apple ProRes 422 LT (Light): less compressed than Proxy, data rate under 102Mb/sec, good for offline editing
• Apple ProRes 422 (also referred to as SQ for standard quality): visually lossless, offline or online quality, data rate up to 145Mb/sec
• Apple ProRes 422 HQ (High Quality): visually lossless, online quality, handles multiple generations well, data rate up to 220Mb/sec
• Apple ProRes 4444: visually lossless, online quality, handles multiple generations, data rate up to 330/Mb/sec, full bandwidth 4:4:4 color space encoded in either Y'CbCr or RGB, up and supports a 16-bit lossless alpha channel for preserving transparency, great for encoding from/to HDCAM SR.

An overview here

ProRes HQ and ProRes 4444 are high quality mastering formats. All ProRes codecs (except for ProRes 4444) are encoded in Y'CbCr with 4:2:2 color sampling (the same professional standard used in most high-end SD and HD video) and 10-bit depth (optionally 8-bit as well). ProRes 4444 supports up to 12-bit depth images