Apple released free Quicktime playback codecs a year later for both OSX and Windows, which probably accelerated adoption throughout the industry.
But with a large existing Final Cut user base, ProRes received much wider industry acceptance than Cineform did, despite having no major technological advantages, and being initially limited to OSX systems, with FCP installed. As a PC based editor, I was a long time advocate for Cineform’s codec and tools. This trend continued as both eventually released support for 12bit 444 data with alpha, and then expanded resolution support to 2K, 4K and beyond. It was basically Apple’s version of Cineform, which had offered an identical feature set and compression ratios since 2002. It uses DCT based compression to store 10bit 422 HD video data in an efficient format. ProRes is a Quicktime codec that was first released in 2007.
