Is SheerVideo useful for animation?
Sometimes. For traditional 2-dimensional animation, Apple’s Animation codec is the best choice, because it compresses such material much more than SheerVideo. And unlike SheerVideo, the Animation codec also supports low-precision color modes that are ideal for constant-shaded animation. However, for more-realistically shaded animation, SheerVideo compresses better than the Animation codec, which looks for runs of identical pixels. And for naturalistic 3-dimensional animation such as Pixar’s work, SheerVideo compresses twice as well as the Animation codec. SheerVideo also compresses twice as fast as Animation, although it decompresses 30% slower. Note that SheerVideo supports both RGB[A] 8b formats, for film animation, and Y’CbCr[A] 8b 4:4:4[:4] and 4:2:2 formats, for television and direct-to-video animation.
