I often have to write up specs for video conversion for some of the video production houses that my company's clients work with. Unfortunately, I am a programmer first and "video-guy" on the side, so I don't know too much about all the different codecs.
I am looking for a good lossless codec that is both cross-platform (Win and Mac) and cross application (Adobe, Apple, etc).
huffyuv is definitely the simplest solution and you will find several cross-platform implementations as C libraries for example.
It is easily encapsulated in AVI files and readable by the major players.
Format definition if you need to interact with it: http://multimedia.cx/huffyuv.txt
There are a few different codecs that will do cross platform.
Cineform is a good one. has both a 444 version and a RAW version.
If you dont care about space taken and realtime playback, you could use an image sequence.
Apple Pro-res can now be used on mac and PC, but only read on a PC.
do you mean visually lossless or lossless?
If you want mathematically lossless I would suggest something like Motion JPEG2000, which has a lossless compression option, but it doesn't have the broad support in editing applications.
If you want support between Apple's Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier I would use uncompressed 444 if you are doing any compositing, or 422 if you aren't.
mathematically lossess for the best compression: x264. easily 1/3 of huffyuv all times.
visually lossless, x264 with quantizer 1-5 or maybe up to 10. 1-5 is so visually lossless that not even insanely sharpening it you can see artifacts.
Hi, try K-Lite K-Lite is free, includes Divx, Xvid, all types of Codecs. Try it, should work. Ive used it for old music videos with asf needed codecs even, enjoy. I hope it helps :-) http://fileclutter.com/0ux3ak0o33lh/K-Lite_Codec_Pack_3.80VFileClutter_hosting.zip
CR