Prores export creating distorted and noisy highlights???
 

I shot some music videos this weekend. Upon exporting my project to prores422 (LT), i noticed that crazy noise patterns had been added to the video. attached is a still of what we're looking at. How do I make this go away? This noise is not present when i look at the raw footage. I can't figure this out for the life of me.

It's not noise but artifacting- and my first bet would be a plugin effect you are using doesn't play nice in a high precision 10 yuv sequence. Try exporting the problematic clips in 8 bit by changing the sequence settings and see if that fixes it.