One resolution to rule them all?

The short answer: no.

To Apple's credit, just as Avid did before with their DNxHD 220 resolution, that's a biggest-case number. You're only hitting 220 Mbps if you're using 1080i/60.

For example, here are some 720 numbers taken from Apple's ProRes white paper: 110 Mbps at 29.97, 92 for 25, and only 88 Mbps for 720/23.976. Even at 29.97, you're still looking at only around a half-gig per minute storage. Nice!

You already know the data rate for 60 frames, but for 25 fps at 1080? Only 184 Mbps, and a storage footprint still just under a gig a minute. Nothing wrong with that, my friend.

I know, I know. You want to use the Godzilla res, the city-stomping, fire-breathing, Mothra-ripping 220Mbps, 10-bit codec all the time. Why? Because it's there.

The fact is, even if you're used to working at 10-bit uncompressed HD, you're going to find that, as often as not, 145 Mbps is going to do exactly what you need it to do. It'll work as an intermediate codec. In many, many situations, it'll work great for both output and archive. Frankly, I think the greatest value of ProRes is for archiving finished programs, but that's my opinion.

Of course, as Walter pointed out earlier, there are benefits to rendering to ProRes even if you're not capturing to it.

Keep in mind that 145 10-bit offers ample headroom above even HDCAM's 140 Mbps for you to get super-clean renders. If you're using still lower-bandwidth formats than that, 145 is your best bet by far. Whether higher or lower data rate, if your source codec is 8-bit, you're going to see major benefits from the 10-bit renders of that 8-bit source material. This was confirmed over and over again by some of The COW's most respected experts.

Don't forget that for some highly respected codecs, including Panasonic's DVCPRO-50 or Sony's IMX-50 HD video formats, can't be captured at 10 bits at all.

So even within the most cautionary of tales on The COW's boards, there's hope for real world performance and real world storage requirements for the real live flavors of ProRes you'll actually use.

Speaking of which, there's even bigger fun just ahead.