Viable Replacement for Photojpeg

There are many talks on codecs but none of them is satisfactory from this point of view. So, here it is:


Do you know any good replacement for Photojpeg? Good in terms of quality, size, editability and to be accept it by editors community, i.e. our buyers.

Christian.

Not yet. All the major sites accept or require photo or motionjpeg. Why duplicate your efforts by submitting multiple formats to multiple sites? In your opinion, what is the major problem with the photojpeg format?

I have been looking at "lagarith" for a couple of years now and don't understand why it has not been accepted more widely 9porbably becuase it belings to the AVI side of the world). It is a really nice compression algorithm as well as allowing for full 32 bit (alpha) for AVI of course (interlaced or progressive). Maybe someday the quicktime favoritism stuff will end.

What I need is:

1. Alpha channel but not with the size price of Animation codec
2. A better compression ratio - kind of h264 or close to
3. Plus what I mentioned in OP.

PNG + Alpha is the best codec with alpha in my opinion because of it's compression size, also it's pretty widely accepted. It's been a few years since but I did allot of compression testing and no matter what that embedded alpha is going to make your file size large but it's not as large as some of the others. Some people see it as a big deal but play with the quality settings, a few % here and there is totally OK, you won't start to actually notice visible quality loss till 75-80% but even that depends on the codec, I don't like to go below 90-95%.

Luma matte as your alpha is another route to take but I don't know how widely accepted that is. It would be great if we could all pool our resources since so many have used different editing packages at one point or another and then we could find out what is most widely accepted. Also I'm not sure what size savings if any you will have over PNG+ alpha since your trading the embedding for basically a double length clip.

It doesn't support alphas, but just know that you can upload files here in H.264 if photoJPEG's getting boring.

Kennon, are ya'll seeing any quality difference between Photo JPEG and H.264?

Interesting, I could convert to .mov (h.264) and keep my original camera codec. Even if I save at 100% quality, files are so much smaller than PhotoJpeg....I would save a lot of disk space...but will clients buy h.264 clips?

There's been a bit of a stigma with H264 because it began as a web format, but we've seen it can create some beautiful broadcast-quality clips. The advantage it has over Pjpeg is the size issue, and therefore the fact you can output 1:1 instead of dropping the quality to 80%. As far as quality goes, they both create high-quality images. People do buy h.264, though our collection on the site is pretty small at the moment.

Photo jpg compresses individual frames and a lot of other codecs compress over multiple frames (eg h264). That's why the final file size is different.