A camera can do these things to make video:
1. Debayer
2. Lens correction
3. Cropping
4. Resampling (with sharpening, possibly)
5. White balancing
6. Contrast adjustment and other "looks"
7. Display rendering
8. Color space encoding
9. Noise reduction
10. Compression
Raw means the camera does none of the above, or maybe just compression (and sometimes noise reduction). You need to do some or all of the rest yourself in post.
But there's something not quite as raw as raw, called scene-referred color. That's what the camera log color spaces are, such as Canon Log and Arri Log C. With scene-referred color, the camera doesn't apply a look and may or may not do white balancing and display rendering. The look is totally up to you and must be done in post. A scene-referred image can have just as much color precision, dynamic range, resolution, and as large a gamut as any raw image, and just as much flexibility to manipulate color in post, including white balance correction. A scene-referred image can be compressed and have noise reduction, or not. If the image is recorded with full resolution, you can do lens correction and resampling just as well as on a raw image.
So let's be clear when we talk about raw and ProRes and what can or cannot be done with each. There are lots of ways an image can be processed.
1. Debayer
2. Lens correction
3. Cropping
4. Resampling (with sharpening, possibly)
5. White balancing
6. Contrast adjustment and other "looks"
7. Display rendering
8. Color space encoding
9. Noise reduction
10. Compression
Raw means the camera does none of the above, or maybe just compression (and sometimes noise reduction). You need to do some or all of the rest yourself in post.
But there's something not quite as raw as raw, called scene-referred color. That's what the camera log color spaces are, such as Canon Log and Arri Log C. With scene-referred color, the camera doesn't apply a look and may or may not do white balancing and display rendering. The look is totally up to you and must be done in post. A scene-referred image can have just as much color precision, dynamic range, resolution, and as large a gamut as any raw image, and just as much flexibility to manipulate color in post, including white balance correction. A scene-referred image can be compressed and have noise reduction, or not. If the image is recorded with full resolution, you can do lens correction and resampling just as well as on a raw image.
So let's be clear when we talk about raw and ProRes and what can or cannot be done with each. There are lots of ways an image can be processed.