Surprising quality test - ProRes Proxy vs. AVCHD
 

I have my FS700 rigged up to a Pix 240i. I thought by shooting ProRes proxy @ 36mb/s that I'd get a slight quality advantage over the internal AVCHD's 24mb/s. Boy, was I wrong! Of course the Proxy is an editing codec, but I still expected it to hold up as well or better than the AVCHD.

Looking at the screengrab, you can see all kinds of blocking and artifacts. The woman's face on the right really shows it. It's really unusable compared to the AVCHD. Thoughts? I'll probably transcode all the AVCHD and scrap the ProRes. Will stick to 100mb/s or higher from now on when recording ProRes on the Pix.

Re: Surprising quality test - ProRes Proxy vs. AVCHD
 

Bitrate doesn't mean much when you are trying to compare long-GOP codecs with intraframe. I would say you need to at least be recording at ProRes422 LT or better to end up with less mosquito noise than H.264 at 24mbps.

Re: Surprising quality test - ProRes Proxy vs. AVCHD
 

As Tim says, ProRes benefits are in ballistics of editing, not bitrate reduction. You'll need faster processors to get AVCHD realtime performance but smaller file sizes.