ComfyUI Now Exports ProRes: How to Hand AI Video to Your Editor as a 422 HQ or 4444 Master

The weakest link in a lot of AI video is not the model. It is the file the model's shot gets saved into.

For most of the last two years, a clip made in ComfyUI left as an H.264 MP4: the format your phone uses for vacation video. It is small and it plays everywhere, and it was designed to be watched, not worked on. Pull one into an edit, push the grade a little, add a title over it and export again, and the banding and blocky shadows that were invisible on first playback start showing up. Editors learned to convert every AI shot before cutting, which is an extra step, an extra copy and an extra chance to get the settings wrong.

ComfyUI v0.44.0, released November 4, ends that detour. It saves ProRes, the codec most edit suites treat as a working master, including ProRes 4444 with a transparency channel. It also has a default that will fill your drive faster than you expect, and two settings you should touch every time.

What changed

The change came in through one pull request, merged November 1 and shipped in v0.44.0. It adds ProRes as a codec and MOV as a container to ComfyUI's built-in video nodes.

Two nodes matter:

• Save Video now offers mov as a format. Pick it and ProRes is the only codec on offer. Pick auto with ProRes as the codec and it chooses MOV for you. MKV also accepts ProRes, though most editors will want MOV.
• Create Video, the node that turns a stack of frames into a clip, gains a chroma_subsampling setting with four choices: auto, 444, 422 and 420. This one setting decides which kind of ProRes you get.

The encoder underneath is FFmpeg's ProRes encoder, the free implementation most open-source tools use, not Apple's own. More on what that means below.

The one setting that picks your ProRes

Chroma subsampling sounds technical, but every editor already knows the idea. Your eye cares more about brightness detail than color detail, so most video formats store color at lower resolution than brightness. The node's own tooltip puts it in one line: "444 keeps full color resolution, 422 halves horizontal color resolution, and 420 halves both axes."

ComfyUI's new code maps that choice straight onto a ProRes flavor:

• 422 gives you ProRes 422 HQ. This is the workhorse. Apple's ProRes white paper rates 422 HQ as holding up through many rounds of decoding and re-encoding, which is exactly what an edit does to a shot.
• 444 gives you ProRes 4444. Full color resolution, and the only ProRes family that can carry transparency. Apple describes 4444 as a format for storing and exchanging motion graphics and composites.
• 420 is not something ProRes does. The code moves an unsupported choice to the nearest one that works and prints a warning in the console.

Here is the catch. When you leave the setting on auto and feed ProRes frames you generated, the code defaults to full color resolution. That means ProRes 4444, the larger of the two, for every clip, whether you need it or not.

How much larger? Apple's white paper lists target data rates for 1080p at 29.97 frames per second: 220 megabits per second for 422 HQ, about 99 GB per hour, and 330 megabits per second for 4444, about 148 GB per hour, before you add a transparency channel, which raises it. For a ten-second AI shot, either is trivial. For a night of batch renders, the 50 percent difference is real disk space.

Bit depth: the second setting

ProRes in this encoder tops out at 10 bits per channel. Ask for 12 and the code saves 10 with a console warning: "prores_ks does not support 12-bit color; saving at 10-bit instead."

Create Video's bit_depth setting defaults to auto, and for ordinary (non-HDR) color, auto means 8-bit. The code moves depths the encoder cannot write to the nearest one it can, so you will probably still get a 10-bit file. I would not leave that to guesswork. Set bit_depth to 10 by hand, if the node offers it, and you know what you shipped.

A fair question: if the model made 8-bit pictures, what does 10-bit buy you? It does not add detail that was never there. It gives the grade room. Every color correction rounds numbers, and in 8 bits those rounding errors show up as bands in skies and gradients. A 10-bit container gives the editor's adjustments room to land without breaking your shot.

Put this into practice

Here is the setup I would save as a template and reuse.

For a shot going into an edit:

1. Update ComfyUI to v0.44.0 or later.
2. Send your frames into Create Video. Set the frame rate to match your timeline.
3. Set codec to prores.
4. Set chroma_subsampling to 422. This is the step that keeps you off 4444 by accident.
5. Set bit_depth to 10 if it is offered.
6. Feed the result into Save Video and set the format to mov.
7. Drop the .mov into your editor. It should play on the timeline without a conversion step. If your editor offers to "optimize" or transcode it, something upstream went wrong; check the console for a fallback warning.

For a graphic, a cutout element or anything with transparency: do the same, but set chroma_subsampling to 444. ComfyUI's own tests write a ProRes 4444 file with a transparency channel and read it back intact, from frames that carry transparency or from a separate mask. How you get transparency into your graph in the first place depends on the model; plenty of video models produce none. When a transparent-video model does produce it, 4444 is the file your compositor wants, because it drops onto a timeline over other footage with no keying.

If your video model hands you a finished clip rather than frames: some video nodes output a clip directly. Put that straight into Save Video with mov. The code keeps the clip's own color layout where it can, and moves anything ProRes cannot hold to the nearest setting, with a warning. Check the console after the first run.

A thirty-second check before you trust the template:

• Open the file's info in your editor or a media inspector and confirm it says ProRes 422 HQ (or 4444) and 10-bit.
• Push a heavy grade onto a shot with a sky or a soft gradient, then do the same to the old MP4 version. Look for bands. This is the test that tells you whether the switch was worth it.
• Check the file size against your expectations. If every clip is coming out big, look at whether chroma_subsampling slipped back to auto.

Where it breaks

It is FFmpeg's encoder, not Apple's. Edit software reads these files every day; most open-source video tools write ProRes the same way. But if a broadcaster or streamer gives you a delivery spec, read it. Some specs name an approved encoder, and this is not that. For a working master inside your own edit, it is fine. For a final delivery to someone else's spec, check first.

ProRes cannot add quality. It protects what the model made from getting worse. A soft, flickering 480p clip saved as ProRes is a soft, flickering 480p clip in a bigger file. Fix resolution first (ComfyUI also gained a fast free upscaler called RelayVSR in its development version this week), then save ProRes.

The defaults lean large. auto on chroma gives 4444 for generated frames, and auto on bit depth asks for 8. Neither is what most editors want. Templates fix this; forgetting does not.

HDR is there, but probably not for your model. Create Video also offers HDR color settings (HLG and PQ, the two broadcast HDR standards). They label the file correctly. They do not turn standard-range model output into real HDR. Unless your source is genuinely HDR, leave color space on sRGB.

Transparency is documented mostly in code. The release notes mention ProRes and color settings. The transparency path is proven by ComfyUI's tests, not by a written guide, so test your own graph end to end before promising a client a cutout.

Files are big and audio is your job to check. At 1080p, a minute of 422 HQ is roughly 1.6 GB. Create Video takes an audio input and the saved clip carries it, but if your graph drops sound anywhere upstream, ProRes will not bring it back. Confirm the audio track on the first export.

The edit was always the destination

There is a habit in AI video of judging tools by the most impressive clip they can make. Editors judge differently. They ask what happens to the shot after it arrives: does it cut cleanly, grade cleanly, survive three rounds of client notes and a final export. For two years, the honest answer for most AI footage was "only after someone converts it."

That answer just changed for anyone using ComfyUI. It took one pull request and two settings, 422 and 10. Set them, save the template, and run the gradient test on a shot you already delivered as an MP4. If the bands disappear, you have your answer about which file the next job should leave in.

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• Sources: ComfyUI v0.44.0 release · ComfyUI PR #17463 (ProRes support) · Apple ProRes white paper · ComfyUI PR #17511 (RelayVSR)