What is the best lossless compression for video?

Question

I have a large amount of captured video, which is saved in uncompressed format.
I want to archive this video and I need to figure out what the best compression choice is.
It's video only and I want the archived materials to be compressed as losslessly as possible and as small as possible. Losslessness is more important than size. The original material was captured in FCP from a video camera using Firewire. It is NTCS DV.
Multiple angles of this source material were edited in FCP and rendered to make the final, uncompressed files. Those are what I need to compress and archive.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There is no such thing as lossless compression.
This is not really true. There are many ways to compress - just google "compression algorithms" and you'll find some. Two basic schemes are either lossless or lossy. Lossless seeks to remove redundant or repetitive information, this is like Run Length Encoding or LZW encoding. Lossy throws away information that is generally "not perceived". JPEG, MPEG, H.264, DV are examples of lossy compression.
YUV "lossless" is 4:2:2 and is considered uncompressed, yet it takes up less space than RGB 4:4:4 encoding. Simply zipping the file compresses it (uncompressed codecs squeeze better, but DV does compress, indicating redundant information) - a TIFF sequence might have run length encoding or LZW. Both are lossless.
To get back to the question, Patrick:Losslessness is more important than size.
H.264 is a fantastic compression - it is, however, FAR from lossless AND it is not directly editable. You'd need to convert it back to an editable format, ensuring even more loss. Not within the parameters of your desired solution...
Patrick