Comment by shellac
4 hours ago
I've attempted to get researchers to use lossless H.264 to encode CT scans. They typically use directories full of tiffs. Even with intra-slice compression (i.e. tiff compression) they are pretty huge. But H.264 will let you recover the original images to the individual bit, and save a huge amount of space thanks to inter-slice similarities.
They are still using directories of tiff, though.
I’d imagine the main drawback of using H.264 here is that you’d still have to decode to get the frames back. This is similar to how even though many consumer grade cameras will output natively to h.264, if you want to edit the videos from it you’d usually have to convert it to prores or something first (the editor would usually do this automatically behind the scenes)
I’m not sure if lossless h.264 is I only or not, but if it uses inter-frame compression then it’s difficult to randomly access arbitrary frames. For any arbitrary frame you’d have to find the nearest key frame, then interpolate from there based on the inter-frame compression metadata.