ProRes on the PC
 

I wanted to refute something I said on these forums some time ago, and it's a pleasant thing so hopefully this helps others.

In my work, I have occasion to trade files back and forth with Mac users. In the past this has been a royal pain. Having to work in QT Lossless, or PNG, or other such format. Recently, I moved to using the Avid DNxHD codec, and that's terrific for new work where the Mac user knows he or she will be working with a PC user and needs a suitable format to trade back and forth with.

Recently, Apple enabled ProRes playback in Quicktime. I had previously thought (and said) that this was playback only, and was not helpful for editing. However, after a user here on DVi helped me with some testing, I can confirm that I was able to open and edit both a ProRes 422 and a ProRes HQ file. So it seems that if the PC user installs the latest Quicktime, or installs codec support for ProRes, they can indeed open and edit Mac ProRes encoded files.

I cannot verify this for anything but Sony Vegas 8.0c and 8.1. Hopefully others can try this with Premiere, Edius, Avid, and others. But at least its a real start in opening up high quality transfers between the two major platforms.

All I can say is, it's about friggin' time Apple!

Note, I still support DNxHD for projects that must go back and forth, since PC users still cannot encoded to ProRes. Which is a shame.

At the risk of cross-posting (I replied in the Mac section) , out of curiosity I tried the clips on my Premiere CS4 install at home, and the clips worked fine...needed to render, of course, but played fine and output to a test AVI file with no problem. //B.Vaughan

The original post is a bit confusing, because you infer that ProRes support is not just playback only, and then describe playback functionality.

End result, ProRes QT files have playback-only support on PC, still not encode/write support. Maybe someday, but don't hold your breath.

Sorry for the confusion Mike. The Apple site talks about playback inside quicktime only. It says nothing of enabling PC based NLEs to access ProRes or ProResHQ files on the timeline. This is something that I hadn't expected, but is a TERRIFIC perk for PC users wishing to handle ProRes files.

No, you still can't encode to it, and I won't hold my breath. It's taken this long just to be able to READ the things. Now if Apple would get off their Duffs and allow an AIC reader, I'd be in business.

Apple could make a few extra dollars if they sold a ProRes encoder as a standalone product.

They could make a LOT of extra dollars... But knowing Apple, they'd charge $299 for it and it would gather dust on the shelves.

if your NLE can work with QT, it can work with ProRes since its a part of QT. what I found on a single core machine is that movieplayer played 720p24 ProRes fine, but in PP it choked badly. of course rendering it to the TL codec, all was ok.

This was NOT true until just a few months ago. I was working with all manner of QT files and rendering to them to give to FCP/FCE users. But I could not handle their Prores files. Now I can.