ProRes Video

Building on last year’s revolutionary introduction of Dolby Vision HDR recording on the iPhone 12, this year Apple is upping the game for pro videographers with support for the ultra-high-quality ProRes format.

ProRes is used by professional video editors, and is the native format preferred by Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing suite, and much like shooting RAW photos, it gives video editors much more control during post-production.

The downside, of course, is that it produces absolutely massive files — one minute of 60fps HD ProRes 422 video comes in at 2.2GB, while 4K/60fps video clocks in at 9.5GB/min. The lower quality ProRes 422 LT only reduces those numbers by about 30 percent.

Needless to say, this isn’t going to be something most people will want to use, but it definitely makes the case for a 1TB iPhone this year, since the largest capacity iPhone 12 Pro Max on the market won’t even hold an hour of ProRes 4K/60fps video.

In essence, however, ProRes will do for videographers what ProRAW did for photographers on the iPhone 12 Pro last year. Similarly, we think it’s a safe bet that this one will also be exclusive to the Pro models.