For professional video editors, why is using ProRES on an iPhone much better than regular video for changing colors and fixing the look?

Using ProRes on an iPhone is much better than regular video for changing colors and fixing the look because ProRes is a professional-grade video codec designed specifically for post-production, retaining significantly more visual information than the highly compressed standard video formats like HEVC or H.264 typically used by iPhones for general recording. Regular video codecs prioritize small file sizes for storage and sharing, achieving this through aggressive data compression that permanently discards much of the original image data. ProRes, by contrast, employs a much lighter, less destructive compression method, preserving critical information essential for color manipulation. The primary technical advantages of ProRes for professional color grading and look fixing stem from three key areas: bit depth, chroma subsampling, and compression type. First, ProRes typically records at a higher bit depth, commonly 10-bit, compared to the 8-bit depth of standard iPhone video. Bit depth refers to the number of color or tonal values available for each primary color channel (red, green, blue). In 8-bit video, each channel has 256 possible shades, totaling over 16 million colors. While this seems like a lot, it provides limi....