Is SheerVideo useful for the Microcosm codec?
Yes. If time is more valuable to you than space, then SheerVideo is a heaven-sent replacement for Microcosm, since SheerVideo encodes 70 times faster (110 MiB/s on a 1-processor 1 GHz Mac G4) than Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm codec (1.5 MiB/s), and SheerVideo decodes 15 times faster (100 versus 6.3 MiB/s). Yet for real-world footage, SheerVideo is only 3% less powerful (2.20 versus 2.27). And unlike Microcosm, SheerVideo also supports native video formats as well as RGB[A], although Microcosm also supports 16-bit channels. On the other hand, for poster-quality content, Microcosm tends to have much higher compression power. If you need this extra power, then SheerVideo can serve as a faster and slimmer input format for Microcosm, which is especially useful if you’re trying out multiple parameter settings in Microcosm to see what yields the highest compression.
