Sorry to use such a trick to capture your attention but, well, I did, didn’t I 
No, I don’t have anything about Color and ProRes, they are good tools. I’m just getting a little concerned that lately anything in postproduction has to be revolving around these two technologies, as the other tools are not good enough. I love Apple products and I chuckled about the “reality distortion field” before but things are getting out of hand and it’s time to talk frankly about the shortcomings of these tools.
Color is potentially a fine application but it’s not the be-all-end-all of color correction and grading. The vast majority of CC tasks for the independent movie maker can be performed with others, simpler tools and possibly in shorter time. A combination of After Effects with Magic Bullet Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks in addition to AE’s excellent, 32-bit enabled, Levels effect can achieve the same look in a fraction of the time to learn Color and in a much more stable environment. If you haven’t tried Colorista before I strongly encourage you to download the trial and watch Eric Escobars’s excellent demos. You will be doing primary, secondary and tertiary color correction in no time and you’ll even have fun while doing it. On top of this the Magic Bullet tools work directly inside your host application, After Effects, Premiere or Final Cut. If you start a color correction in Premiere to get a quick look at the possible result, when you’ll edit the project in After Effects the Colorista settings will be carried over and you’ll be able to continue by using AE’s superior masking tools and 32-bit processing. Same thing if you use Final Cut and Automatic Duck to import your project into AE.
Now let’s talk about Prores. Prores is a fine codec for direct acquisition and for intermediate rendering. It’s absolutely not a good idea for roundtripping and possibly the worst format for delivery. Direct acquisition means capturing the footage from your camera directly from Component out of HDSDI. If you digitize your footage out of your tapes, like in the case of HDV or XDCAM you will end up with a generation loss if you convert it to ProRes. It’s similar to saving a Jpeg to a Jpeg. If you roundtrip, moving your footage from one application to the other and back, using ProRes you will be adding generation loss after generation loss. Apple claims that ProRes is visually lossless. That doesn’t mean that it’s lossless. Not by a long shot. Jpeg is visually lossless. Still we know that you can see the difference if you repeatedly save the same file multiple times. Prores is no different. Use it to acquire your footage from the camera, don’t use it for transcoding if you care about preserving the color information of your footage. Use something like BitJazz’s SheerVideo which is designed to be totally, bit-by-bit, lossless. One more thing. If you use ProRes do not deliver your clips with it. Unless the client has ProRes installed he/she will not be able to watch your footage. ProRes currently comes only as part of Final Cut studio so it’s possibly one of the worst choices for footage distribution. Remember, QuickTime is not a codec, it’s a media wrapper format. This means that QuickTime provides a standardized interface for users and programs to access footage that internally is encoded using one of the many codecs available. If you encode in ProRes your client will need to have ProRes installed as well. QuickTime is not enough. Use any of the codecs available in the standard installation of QuickTime. Be aware that some codecs, like AIC, are not available in the Windows version of QuickTime. You can use Photo JPEG at 80% quality for quick review or use SheerVideo. SheerVideo’s “reader”, basically the decoder, is free for anyone and works on both Mac OS and Windows. It does require that your viewer installs the reader but that operation can be done in a few minutes. So, if you are trying to replicate a look, if you are wondering how you can make your footage look like “Oh brother where art thou” or “The Matrix” don’t believe for a minute that you need to use Color. Your current version of After Effects will work jusr. You might need to add a couple of fairly inexpensive plugins but you will be able to achieve amazing results just inside the applications that you already know.
Tags: Apple Color, ProRes, SheerVide