H.264 vs ProRes for Editing in Premiere

[MandicReally]

I am currently planning for a shooting trip in November.  This is a big trade show where Time Is Money!  Last year I shot on a Lumix G7 and just made do with what I had.  That was shooting UHD 4K at 100Mbps and my Laptop did OK with it.  As edits got more complex I had to render my timeline and usually ran at 1/2 Playback Resolution for timeline performance reasons.  

This year however I upgrade to a Lumix GH5 and primarily shoot DCI 4K at 150Mbps (4:2:2/10-bit).  The few times I've worked with this footage on my laptop I have noticed it is definitely heavier on my laptop than the G7 footage was.  I COULD record at the 400Mbps ALL-I codec on the GH5 to improve timeline performance but then I'd need to buy new Memory Cards and still would want a monitor to aid in Focus Pulling. 

Now I'm wondering if renting or buying an Atomos recorder for the ability to record ProRes is a good idea?  That would allow me to record in ProRes directly, and also edit off of the SSDs so I don't have to spend time twiddling my thumbs while ingesting footage.  Any possible image quality benefit of the larger Bitrate codecs would be great but just icing on the cake really.  Also I manual Focus a lot more now than I used to and nailing focus on the little screen of the GH5 is a constant challenge.  Having  a larger monitor to work with would be really nice. 

So can anyone speak to the real world benefit of ProRes over H.264? I was only able to find a few clips of ProRes footage to download and test.  Namely from The BMPCC4k and they played and edited beautifully on my laptop.  However ONE test does not tell the whole story.  

This seems like a logical choice for me but I just don't know and don't want to waste money to find out.  Ideally I would rent a recorder for an unimportant shoot and test it out before I go to this show, but I simply cannot afford that at this moment. 

 

By the way my HP Omen Laptop specs are:
-i7-8750H (Undervolted and Repasted for better boost frequency performance.)

-16GB DDR4 

-NVMe SSD Boot/Scratch Drive

-GTX1060 6GB GPU

-Windows 10

-Editing in the Adobe CC Suite (Audition, Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Though rarely AE on the laptop.)

[Thanatopsis]

I would go Proress every day hands down out of those two options. At the data rates listed you wont see a noticable quality differences instead proress will have a lower cpu burden as its a lower compression format than h264 it will tax your ssd through put a bit more as it will be a slightly higher data rate.

 

Effects will take less time to render as the i frames are closer together so fewer extra frames to have work done to on each render

[MandicReally]

Thanks.  I ended up finding a 

2 hours ago, Thanatopsis said:

I would go Proress every day hands down out of those two options....

Thanks.  I ended up finding a Ninja Inferno for $599 ($200 cheaper than everywhere else) this past weekend and scooped it up.  So I will be recording ProRes this week yet and run it through its paces.  

[Sakat]

To edit I think it is better to avoid H264. If the bitrate is a problem (with Prores) you can lower it, but H264 was designed to share the final videos, not to edit.