h264 lossless coding

Question

Is it possible to do completely lossless encoding in h264? By lossless, I mean that if I feed it a series of frames and encode them, and then if I extract all the frames fro

Answer 1

I agree that sometimes the loss in data is acceptable, but it's not simply a matter of how it looks immediately after compression.

Even a visually imperceptible loss of color data can degrade footage such that color correction, greenscreen keying, tracking, and other post tasks become more difficult or impossible, which add expense to a production.

It really depends when and how you compress in the pipeline, but ultimately it makes sense to archive the original quality, as storage is usually far less expensive than reshooting.