photo jpeg vs. animation....FIGHT!

Greetings

I would love some advice about the animation and photo jpeg codec for intermediary use in editing.

Typically when coming out of my compositing programs and 3-d programs I will encode to animation for final edits in Final Cut Pro. When I have my final edit, I then export as animation to have a lossless file.

While this works fine, I have two beefs with animation, very large file size and high bitrate, making playback impossible, which I understand is not the function of animation (to be played back)...but it would be nice, especially when I'm editing off a firewire 800 drive. It's also a bummer to transfer animation via FTP and such...so large.

So what about photo jpeg at maximum quality instead? I understand photo jpeg will not export an alpha, but in many situations I don't need one.

I can playback photo jpeg at full HD resolutions, it encodes extremely fast and at least to the eye the quality is untouched.

I am working at both 1080&720p. My source footage for the compositing and 3-d work is HDV (so I'm not trying to preserve 4k quality here). Prores 422 was used in compositing, and tga sequences in 3D.

Will I loose anything by going to photo jpeg? Is Final Cut happy editing photo jpeg? Will photojpeg suffice as a lossless final render for archive?

Thanks a bunch in advance!

Hey that's a real awesome site! It should be linked in that compressions FAQ post at the top of the forum. very useful stuff with lots of answers.

well shoot photoJPEG looks like it wins the fight for my uses. If only it had an alpha I would use it always.

thanks for the quick response Daniel!

Tru...still helpful tho.

Yeah I'm gonna just do photoJPEG at 75% being that I don't need 444 compression. Dang I could have saved many a hard drives if I would have know this earlier! :)