I have written a program to analyze the Prores codec.

There are 4 profiles for Prores, numerically 0,1,2 and 3. For example, HQ is profile 2.

Contrary to what people may believe, the lower quality profiles are similar in quality, when rendered, to the higher level profiles such as HQ.

I wrote a program that takes a video and converts it to Prores using each profile and each quantizer. I then increment each profile and quantizer, and check the number of pixels that have changed, and the amount of change in each pixel.

Although it is true that the higher level profiles such as HQ do affect less pixels with the lowest quantizer, the difference is actually very small. from 1 to 64 quantizers, the lower quality profile at quantizer 1 has a similar effect on pixel quality as the HQ profile at quantizer 4 (out of 64).

I will post complete results in the coming days or week.

In addition, I am going to do analytical comparisons between various codecs such as Prores, H264, and MPEG4 and will settle once and for all with codec is the best.

In the table below, the first value is profile 0 and the second is profile 2 (HQ). The quantizer is the 3rd column (a value from 1 to 64, 1 being the highest quality).  You can see that each one only affects about 1% of the total pixels in the 4K video. the first column is the file size.

134583819       0       1       968.1   54398   0.01
115283074       2       3       832.9   47968   0.01