Is SheerVideo useful for the PhotoJazz codec?
Maybe. If you’re using PhotoJazz for real-world RGB[A] 8b data, and if time is a much more valuable criterion for you than space, then SheerVideo is unquestionably a superior substitute for PhotoJazz, since SheerVideo encodes and decodes 50 times faster (110 MiB/s on a 1-processor 1 GHz Mac G4) than BitJazz’s PhotoJazz codec (1.9 MiB/s). And unlike PhotoJazz, SheerVideo also supports native video formats as well as RGB[A], although PhotoJazz also supports 16-bit channels and many other print-oriented formats and features. On the other hand, for poster-quality content, PhotoJazz tends to have much higher compression power, and even for real-world footage, PhotoJazz is 11% more powerful (2.47 versus 2.20) than SheerVideo. If this extra power is important, then SheerVideo can serve as a faster and slimmer input format for PhotoJazz.
