Is Apple prioritising a file format over Mac hardware sales?

It looks like Apple will soon allow their ProRes RAW video capture file format to be read on Windows computers — instead of using Mac-only compatibility to promote high-end hardware sales.

Monday April 8th sees the start of NAB Show 2019. The National Association of Broadcasters trade show is an annual event in Las Vegas where those in TV and the media get together to learn about new technologies and to make deals. The PR strategy for businesses selling to the TV and film business is to announce product and service updates the week before. If they are lucky, their news will be one of the topics of conversation at the event.

High-end post production supplier Assimilate have announced that their SCRATCH system will read Apple ProRes RAW. SCRATCH works on Windows as well as macOS.

RAW

At NAB 2018, Apple and Atomos launched ProRes RAW — a video camera encoding method that doesn’t compromise on quality. The idea of ‘RAW’ picture and video formats is to capture the information as recorded on the camera sensor without converting it to a more computer-friendly ‘non-RAW’ format. It needs to be converted because camera sensors do not capture red, green and blue colour information for each pixel. They capture varying amounts of information per pixel location based on the sensor design. These designs aim to match the way humans recognise colour. For example, more accurate green information is captured because our forest-dwelling forebears evolved eyes that could distinguish more shades of green than shades of blue or red.

The advantage of RAW: no compromise on quality — no picture information is lost. The disadvantage of RAW: sensor information needs much more CPU and GPU power to convert to traditional RGB images for display and editing.

The problem with non-RAW picture and video formats is that information is lost when converting (transcoding) the camera information to computer-friendly RGB. At the point of conversion, choices are ‘burned into’ the imagery — such as information about the camera, what kind of look was hoped for. When we have accurate measurement of greens, we have to simulate eqivalent precision for reds and blues. When footage is transcoded, information is nearly always thrown away.

The amount of computing resources available to do the conversion to RGB is also a problem. If done in the camera, its processor has much less than the time it takes to convert one frame’s worth of sensor information to RGB before the next frame must be captured and converted. That is a conversion to RGB (and an encoding to an editing video format) of over 8MB (for 4K) every 60th of a second. This is on a camera computer constrained in size and power due to heat considerations.

The final quality of a picture or video is determined by the amount of information thrown away at each stage of production. Up until now information has had to be thrown away because computer hardware has not been able to deal with the amount (and kind) of information captured by cameras. Now the CPUs and GPUs on modern computers are powerful enough to handle raw sensor data.

ProRes: the ‘Avid’ of video formats

If you work in TV or film, but your job means you don’t need to know much about the technology of post production, you only need a few key words. ‘Avid’ makes the video editing application that nearly all productions are made with. ‘ProRes’ is the high quality format used to share video with teams and between companies.

Producers, directors and marketing people can then say things like “I need a ProRes,” or “Can I come and see the latest version on the Avid?” If you were to then show them a DNxHR-encoded MXF file playing back in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, they would say “Looks great. I haven’t seen that version of Avid before” and you could answer “It’s a new version,” and they would be none the wiser.

For people non involved in the technology of post, using ‘Avid’ to mean any post production application and ‘ProRes’ to mean any video file is fine. Avid benefit from this kind of recognition. Despite many post workflows moving over to Final Cut Pro in the 2010s, it took a few years for non-tech people to recognise ‘Final Cut’ as ‘another kind of Avid.’

Today Apple benefit from the brand recognition of ‘ProRes’ in TV and film. This brand recognition has probably sold tens of thousands of Macs over the years. The ability to play ProRes files hasn’t been limited to the Mac, but until recently, there have been few Apple-sanctioned ways for Windows and Linux machines to write ProRes files. Mainstream video applications haven’t been able to produce ProRes files on Windows and Linux. However in December 2018, Adobe added the ability to export ProRes to Premiere Pro CC.

Who knows if Adobe decided to swallow sky-high licensing fees from Apple, or Apple decided to not limit ProRes encoding for Windows users — maybe it was a combination of these things. It means that having a Mac is no longer a requirement for doing mainstream video production using ProRes.

ProRes is no longer only about selling Macs.

Apple systems, not Apple hardware

Perhaps now that Apple have established ProRes as the standard format for high-end post production (even if it just the name — many post workflows use other formats), they are more confident in making it fully cross-platform. It is surprising however that they will allow their only year-old RAW flavour of ProRes to also go cross-platform.

Reading ProRes RAW on Windows means that Assimilate SCRATCH on location will be able to prepare footage for collaboration and editing (‘make dailes’). This transcoded footage could then be edited using Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The resultant timeline could then go into the SCRATCH finishing system which would then produce the final master using the ProRes RAW-encoded camera source footage. No involvement in Apple hardware or software needed —possibly just a proportion of the monthly fee for SCRATCH being paid to Apple as a licensing fee.

The old Apple way would be to keep their best technology to only work on their OSes — to promote hardware sales. The new way seems to be moving towards Apple being a company that promotes collaboration systems. Confident enough for these systems to include different OSes, hardware and software. Confident because Apple have the quality (and mindshare) that despite the competition their OSes, hardware, software and services to be the ones that the market choose.