Iain Anderson at Pro Video Coalition has a must read article on Why ProRes?
Luckily ProRes has become pretty standard across my editing. Most cameras can record to it, and it works great, with so little processing power. Personally I don’t even like bringing any MP4’s in, and convert even them to ProRes Proxy.
Of course now with a Blackmagicdesign 6k Pro I have been shooting BlackMagic RAW and it in 6K certainly seems to take more processing power than ProRes, but it is also more compressed.
I would like to see how the M1 processors can handle H.264, which might mean less recompressing. I just see standardizing on a format to make Premiere work more like AVID, which has always been the most stable editing system.