What's up with ProRes

Question

First of all, I am a total hack and rarely knows what many of the terms thrown around on this forum even mean. I have been happily chugging along on a macbook pro with FCE for the last 18 months, have obviously done a lot of lucky guessing on alien-sounding setting choices, and have had a sharp eye for the "make it happen with no problems" button. After mixing a fat overtime paycheck with a six-pack and some online shopping, I am sitting on a Mac Pro 2x3.2gh which I fed 16 Gs of RAM and FCS2. Camera is a Sony HC5.
I have spent hours reading the pros and cons of what appear to be my two choices for video format: HDV vs ProRes (AIC, which proved to be fast in my tests, is a no-go for lack of TC and thus no Media Manager trimming benefits). With ProRes taking the majority vote, I thought I would confirm it and see how smokin' fast my new rig was. The results were the opposite of what I've read and by a long shot.
My test must be flawed, but I set up three projects - HDV, ProRes SQ and ProRes HQ. I meticulously checked settings and imported the same bit of footage, each time being converted during import to its respective project format, then made three identical 30 second projects with a few transitions, some slowmo, a matte, and an effect. Timing the "Render All" put HDV 4 times faster than ProRes HQ which in turn was slightly faster than SQ. All printed back to tape and made into SD DVD by simply clicking default "make quicktime movie" and imported to iDVD. All of it looked fine to me.
Do my render results check with anybody, or sound completely bogus? Is a shiny new computer making these HDV long render times a non-issue. I can't figure it out.

Answer 1

The two posts above are right on. ProRes has been designed as an algorithm to handle uncompressed 4:4:4 footage, which if left uncompressed, will bring an 8 core with 16GB of ram to its knees. This is because there's just too much data to process with Uncompressed footage, not to mention your hard drive will never spin fast enough to read it unless configured in an external RAID (with at least 5 discs).
HDV, on the other hand, is a compressed HD format that kills color down to 4:1:1, and uses MAJOR compression to fit "HD" images onto a DV tape.
You've probably found a bit of a hiccup if you convert HDV footage to ProRes in that the file sizes jump immensely. That may account for your "lagging" renders and editing. There's simply more info to manage.
HDV should be kept in HDV format. HDV should never be "color corrected" as there color compression doesn't allow for true color space manipulation. You'll end up with a lot of blocks.
ProRes is for taking Raw 4K, or even 2K footage, or Uncompressed Film Telecine and making it manageable on a high end workstation.
"Just cause you have a hammer doesn't mean every problem can be solved with a nail."