I'm surprised not to find a single reference in The COW so far to "Medium Quality" ProRes. Is it just too new? Is shiny, shiny new 220 and 145 too bright for anyone to have noticed it yet? Allow me to point the way.
Apple has been thoughtful enough to provide "medium quality" for your working pleasure, a quarter-res flavor of ProRes to give you maximum bang for your performance buck. As they say in their White Paper:
When real-time playback in Final Cut Pro is set to medium quality, ProRes 422 is decoded to half of the horizontal resolution and half of the vertical resolution. This produces more real-time performance for effects, transitions, and multistream playback.
"Hey wait!" you say. "Right there I just saw Apple plainly saying that "Medium Quality" is half res, not quarter."
Ah, but look more closely. What they actually plainly say is half the resolution in both the horizontal and vertical axes. But, unlike my high school physics class where I got to the finish line by just setting up the equation, we need to actually do the math here. Let's pull up our OS X calculator widget and multiply point 5 by point 5 to find the answer. Yep, point 25. Medium Quality is quarter res.
And you know what? It kicks mighty, mighty booty. It's absolutely gorgeous, and the performance is somewhere around -- Anyone? Buehler? Buehler? -- FOUR TIMES better than full quality ProRes. I promise that once you've worked with quarter res ProRes, you're going to use it all the dang time.
The place you should always, no exceptions, be working at quarter res: laptops. The white paper again:
Real-time playback of HD ProRes 422 on a laptop. Even on a MacBook Pro, Final Cut Pro provides real-time playback of HD ProRes 422. For ProRes 422 HQ streams in1080i60 format, most laptops can achieve real-time playback at the medium-quality setting (1/2-by-1/2 size) in Final Cut Pro.
Yeah, yeah, But for 24p HD formats, even ProRes 422 HQ streams will play back at full resolution on most MacBook Pro laptops.
Yeah yeah. And with normal-quality ProRes 422, multistream HD laptop playback is a reality.
It's true, you can do it. It is indeed reality. But come on. Is maybe, most, playback what you're looking for? Now way, dude. Let's read that first one again:
When real-time playback in Final Cut Pro is set to medium quality, ProRes 422 is decoded to half of the horizontal resolution and half of the vertical resolution. This produces more real-time performance for effects, transitions, and multistream playback. THAT's what I'm talking about.
Why would you not want that? Especially when you see how good it looks?
What you won't see from quarter-res ProRes in the real world, hardly ever, is a quality difference, especially while editing on a typically sized UI. What you will see is a massive performance boost.
A little story about quarter-res Avid DNxHD that I fully believe will play out with quarter-res Pro Res. I was demoing DNxHD on a 30-foot diagonal screen, using a prototype Barco projector that was going to be their new top of the line. The pictures out of this thing were unbelievable. My footage was 720p/24, blown up super big, and bright enough to expose every blemish to anyone within a quarter mile. (A SERIOUSLY bright projector.) And yet, we were working at quarter res, at 35 Mbps no less, and it looked phenomenal.
Here's where it gets really wild. Practicing safe demo, I rebooted every time before I began every show. I didn't notice it at first, but it turns out that, every time I rebooted, the Avid timeline reverted to its default state of half-quality.
At first I tried to divert attention away from it, which by the way, is the very, very very first thing any demo artist learns. BTW, once you learn how to watch for this maneuver, you'll be shocked at how often you see it. But the QUARTER res footage at HALF quality looked so freaking good that I quickly worked it into my demo.
"That quarter res footage looks great, doesn't it? But looky there! My sequence is only half quality. Half quality QUARTER RES!! Can you believe it?”
The jaws dropped. They couldn't.
Since ProRes is so obviously modeled after Avid DNxHD, and designed with that codec in its crosshairs, I can't imagine that half-quality quarter-res ProRes won't look just as amazing. You won't use it for output. You won't use it for archiving. But once you see it, I bet you'll use it for editing. Every single day.
When I get my FCS 2 installed, my first stop is going to be quarter-res ProRes. It should be your first stop too. Try it. You'll like it.
