iPhone: H.265 Vs ProRes! which is BETTER?

iPhone 15 can shoot videos in 4 to2 10

bit the same color and bit depth used by

the video Centric mirorless cameras we

use today but this leaves you with a

choice between shooting and prores or

HBC AKA h265 you think it's a simple

Choice till you realize that prores HQ

is 17 times bigger than h265 with barely

any perceivable difference so this makes

you think is it really worth it to shoot

in prores not to mention that h265 is so

small that you can shoot at maximum

resolution and frame rate internally no

need to worry about rigging your phone

with any external SSD which also adds to

the cost and complexity of your setup so

after a lot of tests and experiments I

can confidently answer this question

with a definite yes prores is worth it

and no it's not I mean it depends well I

guess it's not that simple the question

is never about which one is better it's

always about better for what and to

answer that question you need to learn

more about how each of these codecs

function their pros and cons and how to

test them yourself in this episode I'll

share everything you need to know to

find the best codec for your needs I'll

show you the test that revealed the real

differences between both of them and

finally share the simple tools and test

methods I used to reach to my

conclusions so you can use them yourself

to find the best codec for

[Music]

you everything you're about to see here

was shot with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and

recorded externally on the 1 TB X10 SSD

from crucial that was mounted using my

custom rig that you can find in this

episode I'll leave the link below so we

have two clips Charan prores and h265

they look visibly identical even if I

zoom in you won't notice much of a

visible difference but in fact there's a

massive difference that I'll show you

that's cleverly hidden under all this

which confirms how those AB comparisons

you find all over social media are at

best inaccurate and at worst misleading

simply because profile makers know

there's so much more that meets the eye

when comparing codex so please don't

fall for those traps and try to conduct

your own test similar to the ones I'll

show you here but but before I do that

let's agree on some basics of how a

Kodak Works to better understand this

difference when we see it so whether

it's a mirrorless camera or a Smartphone

when shooting any clip you're basically

telling the camera to capture the image

on its sensor then tell the processor to

use the codec secret compression SCE to

compress it which means to encode it

into a compressed lump of digital

gibberish that you'll send to your

computer to uncompress decode and turn

back into an image you can work with in

case you didn't know that process of

encoding on your phone then decoding on

your computer is where we got the word

code from what happens under the hood in

these two processes is what really

matters to us to help us choose the

right codec encoding controls the final

image quality and file size after

compression and decoding controls the

editing performance of that clip on your

computer it's basically the amount of

time it takes for your computer to

translate the codak into the language

your editing software can understand

what makes it tricky is that each codak

will offer two of these attributes at

the expense of the third so if you need

a codak with high quality image and

great editing performance then the cost

would be happy having a big file size no

kudak in the market was able to

perfectly balance these three not today

at least let's quickly understand what

they mean quality is more about how

closely the details and colors of the

compressed image resemble the original

AKA image Fidelity here's an example of

how a screen grab from the original

video would look like next to its

heavily compressed version they look

almost identical from a distance but as

you get closer you can see how

compression destroyed all the details

each codec has its own method of

destroying your image it's the price you

pay to get a much smaller file size the

smaller you need it to be the stronger

and bigger amounts of compression will

need to be applied and the further away

it will be from the original and that's

what codex compete for how to get as

small as possible while maintaining the

most amount of image Fidelity to give

you an idea about that massive

difference between codc sizes in respect

to their compression this is the

comparison between the same 15 seconds

clip I shot in different codex you can

see how 422 HQ is 17 times bigger than

h265 and that's what makes you think is

it really worth it just for reference

prores still has higher quality flavors

of Quad 4 and quad 4 xq that come in

12bit but these are reserved for Cinema

cameras I used the official proz white

paper from Apple to estimate their

values you can see how they're

exponentially bigger in size the xq is

estimated to be 38 times bigger than the

h265 and more than twice as big as 422

HQ the highest quality iPhone can

capture fun fact Quad 4 and xq are the

Codex of choice when shooting in all AR

cameras which says a lot about prores

high quality standards it just makes a

lot more sense than shooting

uncompressed footage especially when you

see the massive size those uncompressed

files have and that's technically the

amount of data your phone needs to

process right of its sensor and squeeze

into one of these tiny codak nuggets it

does that by using different compression

ratios corresponding to each codc all

happening in real time no wonder why

your phone gets hot when shooting video

so does that mean that h265 is the

smallest of them all because it has the

most amount of compression well it's not

just about the amount of compression but

it's also the efficiency of this

compression my test showed that h265

looks very similar to PR LT yet it's

eight times smaller and that's what

makes h265 compression so special it's a

lot more efficient than prores it

retains a lot of details all while

staying very small and manageable in

size no wonder why it's called high

efficiency video Codec but this high

efficiency came at a price remember the

triangle if it looks good and it's small

then probably it won't perform well

which is the case here see for the h265

to compress your Clips this small

without using too much destructive

compression for your Clips to look that

good hvc had to use super complex and

genious algorithm that requires huge

computational powers to deal with this

complexity which will slow down your

editing performance the third and last

codec attribute and now we established

that editing performance is directly

proportional to how complex the codec is

Let's test this out I have the same for

clip set in two multicam batches of

prores HQ and h265 on the same timeline

scrubbing through prores Clips plays

them in real time with no issues

whatsoever but h265 failed the scrub

test it's not giving me the same

real-time performance I got from prores

and not only the clips are much choppier

final Cut's user interface itself is

also struggling you can see how the

playhead is very choppy so the computer

is clearly struggling here to even

display things properly if we go back to

prores you can see both clips and

playhead are playing just fine the other

funny thing is these press scripts are

all 5.8k footage as you can see here

let's just call it 6 game while these

h265 clips are only 4K which confirms

how prores outperforms h265 by a huge

margin I thought maybe it's just a slow

computer the one I used was a 2019

MacBook Pro with a 9th generation Intel

Core I9 processor and based on Intel

it's the fourth generation of Hardware

accelerated processors optimized for hvc

so maybe Intel just did a bad job at

least in this generation so I repeated

the test on a more recent MacBook Pro

with M2 Max processor we already

established scrubbing through six K

prores was pretty smooth on the older

machine and the good news h265 in 4k

looks a lot smoother here on the M2 but

I still feel it's not as real time as

pred 6K even on the older machine you

can still feel it's a bit choppier let's

check h265 in 6K then for a more fair

comparison clearly it's struggling so

bad scrubbing gives us two or three

frames at most which will turn into a

very frustrating editing experience I

totally understand that iPhone doesn't

shoot in 6K and you'd probably not edit

a multicam clip like this one but here

I'm only trying to show you the breaking

point of h265 and demonstrate the

massive difference in editing

performance compared to prores also keep

in mind everything here has no effects

or any color grading applied whatsoever

so again it's bad news for h265 since

anything you add will make what's

already bad worse okay so let's try to

push press to its Breaking Point by

adding a graphically demanding effect

such as radial blur and once again 6K PR

has exceeded expectations with barely

any impact of course 6K h26 x 5 is

clinically dead and unusable and 4K

seems to be more sluggish than before

borderline manageable but not anywhere

close to prored 6K keep in mind the M2

processor also claims to have a

dedicated prores and HC media engine

that can handle up to 8K we already have

the equivalent of an 8K image with those

four 4ks giving us the 8K horizontal

resolution I assume Apple was talking

about but it's still seems h265 is so

complex to compete with Apple's own

press performance I also feel Apple ruce

this hvc media engine to handle the

basic h265 4K footage shot on their

iPhone which I just confirmed here we

can see how smooth scrubbing is of a

single 4K h265 video stream with an

image and text overlays and a heavy

radial blur effect so if you stay Within

These boundaries and don't go too crazy

with effects you should be fine based on

our test so far h265 has a super small

size it's the main highlight about it

but compromise your editing performance

to get that small and we'll still need

to test the image quality but but it

already looked promising prores on the

other hand offered an unparalleled

combination of multi-stream real-time

editing performance but packaged in a

much bigger file size which is Apple's

word for word online Claim about prores

of course they were trying to be

politically correct in saying reduced

storage rates which would only make

sense when compared to uncompressed

files but far from the truth when

compared to h265 the only thing left now

is to confirm the final claim of

impressive image quality which takes us

to our next chapter image quality and

fidelity after this point it's going to

get a bit technical but I promise you'll

find some pretty interesting discoveries

that I wasn't even expecting which will

ultimately help you answer the question

of which kodc is best for you you take

the blue pill the video ends and you

believe whatever you want to believe

about h265 and prores take the red pill

and I'll show you how deep the

difference between both codecs goes I

strongly recommend to play this in 4k on

a bigger screen to make sure you're

seeing everything I want you to see

without much of YouTube's own

compression okay so we agreed these two

clips look look identical from a

distance let's now take a closer look

and see if we have any visible detail

difference to better see what's

happening under the hood I'll apply some

sharpening it's a super basic method to

reveal compression artifacts such as

micro blocking and fake Edge sharpening

in the h265 we can see four main things

that can explain what's happening with

it first it retains some good details in

the busy areas you can see that in the

stones and the shingles so that's a good

start second solid areas have some very

visible smudges and micro blocking like

in the rim and even sumon the branches

it's a very common thing in codex with

strong compressions to have localized

artifacts in solid areas that's because

they're the easiest to compress into a

bunch of bigger solid blocks without you

noticing hence the name macro blocking

third the image is lacking any sort of

uniform and digital noise smudging all

traces of noise is another compression

trick to reduce the file size but noise

is where you get the impression of high

details when you're zoomed out so what

does the codec do it's our fourth Point

fake Edge sharpening have a look at look

at the edges here they seem to express

some tiny micro blocking artifacts that

give you the impression of sharpness now

looking at prores is pretty much a very

consistent look all around no smudges or

Edge sharpening and we can see the usual

organic looking nose you'd expect this

uniformity is what colorist will

appreciate the most and everything

that's happening with h265 is pretty

much what they see in their nightmares

more compression artifacts means the

image will likely break faster as you

start grading okay so we can already see

how things don't look too good for is x

5 now let's cycle through different

proes compressions and how they compare

to proes HQ which is the highest quality

prz you can get so far on the iPhone so

422 is already starting to show very

subtle compression issues in the solid

areas as well of course nothing as bad

as h65 LT is getting worse and of course

proxy is by far the worst possible it's

the only one that's worse than

h265 okay so if h265 can handle details

relatively well I need to know how well

are we talking about I intentionally

underexposed this test to see how well

each codak handles details in the

shadows of course we'll start seeing a

lot of noise once we bring the exposure

backup but it's already impressive how

much Shadow details were rescued diving

deeper into the image prores HQ nose

pattern is pretty uniform it looks

pretty good and seems easy to Denise

while h265 again has more random noise

pattern with a decent amount of micro

blocking which might be challenging to

clean up and separate from this noise

422 looks almost identical to HQ LT

looks pretty good as well if we Freeze

Frame you'll notice how much better LT

performs in solid areas compared to h65

especially in the left area here but

they both look equally good when it

comes to

details finally proxy looks pretty bad

since it's covered in micro blocking

from top to bottom but still if we pause

on one frame it's a more or less fixed

macro blocking pattern in proxy while

h265 has variable macro blocking sizes

with some super smudge chunks like these

once again not good for D noising which

you'll probably have to apply to clean

up the Shadows at at some point so let's

apply some D noising then PR HQ looks

pretty clean and consistent the D noiser

was able to easily filter out the

consistent noise pattern from the clip

while you can see how h265 has this

weird sort of blobbing happening all

around that's again because of the

inconsistent and unpredictable noise

patterns mixed with micro blocking we

already saw you can also see some tiny

micro blocking around the edges creating

this false sense of sharpness let's

check the other prores flavors 422 and

422 LT are looking pretty

consistent and remember remember how

proxy had a very visible and dominant

micro blocking it also looks good when D

noised again consistency is always good

for D noising okay let's check one last

test for skin tones we already know skin

is a mix of solids and gradients the

kind of things h265 struggles with as we

already saw once again things look good

from Far let's apply our sharpening tool

to diagnose the micro blocking in h265

you can clearly see compression issues

in the solid areas in the skin and the

shingles on the left we have a lot of

irregular micro blocking compared to the

uniform noise pattern in prores but

again both look very similar when it

comes to details cycling through

422 for to2 LT you can see how prores is

much more forgiving and consistent in

dealing with skin finally the last and

least is proxy being the worst of all

prores flavors I guess we established by

now we should never consider shooting in

proxy so let's recap the difference

between h265 and prores prores has by

far been the best performing codec and

that's not just compared to 65 but to

all other codecs out there making it the

top choice for all professional

workflows while hu 65 performance

strongly depends on having the latest

processors with dedicated hvvc engines

and even with that once you start adding

complex effects grading or multi-cam

your performance will badly Decline and

that's another reason why you could say

prores is also the most compatible codec

it just works with whatever you have but

when it comes to size h265 is the clear

and absolute winner size is basically

the main reason you choose h265 not only

over prores but over any other codec but

I'll still give prores the advantage of

offering you a choice of multiple codc

flavors all packaged in different sizes

four of which are compatible with iPhone

15 where the smallest proxy is 3 and 1

half times the size of h265 and the

biggest 422 HQ being almost 17 times

bigger as for details they're both

pretty good but still press is better in

having clean and consistent details that

are easier to denoise as for solids and

gradients h265 fails pretty bad

unfortunately those three are all about

the image quality and Fidelity we

already talked about but there's still

one last drawback in h265 we didn't talk

about that prores is completely immune

to it's called generation loss

resistance let me show it to you using

the same press 4 to2 clip pay attention

to this color Checker I exported the

clip and reimported the new clip again

and I repeated this process five times

so far the fifth generation still looks

identical to the original details and

colors are intact even sharpening

confirms that when applied I pushed it

to 10 Generations once again everything

still looks intact now following the

same process in h265 I discovered some

alarming problems the more generation I

went through on the fifth generation you

can already see some weird color of

setting in the color chips toggling

between them shows it better colors also

seem to have shifted to a yellowish tint

it's more obvious in the background

let's now add the same sharpening the

fifth generation is already a worse

version of that already bad original

have a look at the black color chip here

and how the edges just disappear at some

point That's a classic definition of a

clip breaking

apart in the 10th Generation it went

from worse to the worst more color of

setting also a stronger yellow tint you

can see it here when I toggle

again and when I turn on the sharpening

you can now see how micro blocking is

gone crazy so this phenomena of being

susceptible or resistant to export and

repport is the generation loss

resistance it's about how close every

exported generation is to the original

it's just like when you keep on making

photocopies from photocopies the more

you make the worse they get and the more

they're stored they become from the

original and it's obvious h265 suffers

from that things just get worse every

time you export them to h265 unless you

have a state-of-the-art photocopy your

machine that delivers almost perfect

clones instead of photocopies and that's

the high quality prores flavors that's

why Apple claimed in its white paper

that prores remains visually lossless

through many generations of decoding and

re-encoding then showed us a

multigenerational graph of of how

resilient this codak is to this process

all the way up to the 10th Generation

which we just confirmed with our test

they also answered the question why this

is important by saying how prores Quad 4

and xq are ideal for the exchange of

Motion Graphics media because they are

virtually lossless which technically

makes 4 to2 HQ that you have on your

iPhone the next best thing this feature

is designed for a more collaborative

workflow probably in a bigger production

where your footage will be bouncing

around between editors VFX colorists

composers directors and so on till it

ends up in a movie theater hopefully and

I totally understand this workflow might

not apply to you if you're a solo

filmmaker but even in this case you

should ideally follow the best practice

if you decide to shoot an h265 on your

phone and that's by converting your

Clips immediately to prores 422 if not

422 HQ for all postproduction needs and

then ideally export your final to prores

for archiving in case you might work on

it in the future or to h65 if you only

need it for playback and just want a

safe space so this workflow will help

you avoid the self-destructive nature of

h265 the only reason you tro h265 in my

opinion in a professional setup is only

if you forgot to break your SSD onset

which makes h265 the more practical Cod

simply because you don't need to rig

your phone with any ssds or external

media to record in 4k 60 frames you can

just record internally or maybe even use

a cheap external flash drive for easier

file transfer if you ask me I would

choose h265 for personal memories or

social media content things that don't

require much editing where I might apply

very basic grading or Instagram filters

or as I said if I wanted to shoot in

prores but just forgot my rig with its

SSD all this would probably make 20% of

all my shoots but if I'm shooting clips

for professional use maybe for a

client's social media or to sell a stock

footage which would be a great use of

this phone to make some quick and easy

money then I'll probably shoot in log

with the intention to apply some

Advanced grading or even some VFX then

prores is the way to go 422 HQ is a bit

of an Overkill it's too big with not

much of a quality difference from 4 to2

and proxy is just very low in quality

yet still eight times bigger than H6 5

so if you really care about size you

might as well shoot an h265 instead of

proxy and I would pick 4 to2 in most

cases which has a perfect balance

between quality and size and for 22 LT

if I just want a safe space while

retaining good enough image quality and

shooting in progress would be 80% of the

time I hope I covered everything that

would help you find the best codak for

your needs feel free to ask me anything

in the comment section below thanks

again for watching I'll see you in the

next

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