Is SheerVideo as accurate as the Animation codec?
Yes. SheerVideo is just as accurate as Apple’s Animation codec is at maximum quality: That is, it’s absolutely accurate. However, the Animation codec, which just does run-length coding, optionally lets you reduce the precision of the image before encoding it, thus degrading the image. SheerVideo always encodes a full 8 bits per channel, so it never degrades the image. But for real-world footage, SheerVideo (2.20) is over 100% more powerful than Animation (1.06). And SheerVideo encodes 2.5 times as fast as Animation. And although it decodes 40% slower than Animation RAM-to-RAM, in practice SheerVideo decodes twice as fast as Animation because Animation compresses so little that it runs into the same bottlenecks as uncompressed video. SheerVideo also supports native video formats, which Animation doesn’t. On the other hand, Animation supports low-quality image formats such as indexed-color, and is usually more effective at compressing poster-quality images with large areas of constant co
