Apple Prores 444 vs blackmagic uncompressed HD 422 10bit for HD tape Delivery?

[raufzaza]

Hi,
I'm grading a TV series, shot with RED MX, on apple color (grading from RED RAW), delivering HD tapes for broadcast, which rendering format would you use to output from Apple color?
would you use apple proress 444, or blackmagic uncompressed 10bit which is 422.
and here we are talking about HD Tapes, so 2,3,4 generations of it might happen for broadcasters, HD to SD tape to tape conversion, and don't forget the mpeg compression that the TV channels do to feed the show to their servers.

and one more thing:
I'm going to finish it as 2k, to have a file based backup for the show, then go to FCP prepare it to HD, crop it to 2.66:1, render that in FCP (which I'm afraid of, because of 8bit rendering issues that FCP does), then output to Tape via Aja kona + HDcam recorder.

any suggestions, because when we are talking about proress 444 as Visually lossless compression format, it's still (Visually), and is this format gonna hold against Hardcore mpeg compression, multi generations HD tapes TV cahnnels made, SD digital beacam tapes from those HD generations etc etc.

[Jörgen Persson]

As soon as the image ends up on the HDCAM tape it will be compressed and in 8 bit 3:1:1 colorspace.
Using uncompressed 4:2:2 instead of ProRes444 makes no sense.

ProRes is smaller, has better chroma resolution and it's less prone to have gamma shift problems.

[raufzaza]

Thank you Jorgen.

[M Most]

Thank you Jorgen.

If you're really using HDCam, what Jorgen said is true. If you're using HDCam SR, that is a 10 bit format regardless of whether you're recording 422, 444, 440Mb, or 880Mb.