Its main advantage is that it's faster than animation. It has better file compression ratios than Animation, but retains alpha support (32b/p). Targa (TGA in the format options menu in AE) is a lossless codec that works with video (most people who know it know it from early days of image compression). it just needs to be compatible with CS6 and not be restricted to Windows or Mac. I hope someone can suggest me something, its no problem if the format needs a plugin for After Effects, Premiere etc.

Otional lossy compression like JPEG2000 has, would be great but not necessary. E: And of course lossless if that wasn't clear so far. mov (or any other container, it really doesn't matter), with a good compressability in the range of lossless JPEG2000, atleast 16bit per channel and support for an alpha channel. So what I'm searching is a codec that can be used with container formats like. The crippled JPEG2000 codec in QuickTime is no option. So far I'm very happy with JPEG2000 using the j2k plugin from fnordware, the format has all the good things from legacy JPEG and Animation and has even more features but the downside is the fact that its an image sequence which is not so nice to handle as a single container file. The whole Pro-Res family is a no go as it can only be encoded on a mac (except for the beta version of the ffdshow ProRes encoder).

I generally dislike all the built-in QuickTime codecs as they either dont deliver all the formats options or are just not pracitcal in a multi OS workflow. Though its lossy and has no alpha, thats when we used Animation but that codec is a dinosaur when it comes to compression and bit-depth. The latter always proved as something 'rocksolid' and never made any problems.

So far we used QuickTime Animation and PhotoJPEG. I'm currently searching for new codecs that are better suited for production than the ones we are currently using.

Best codecs for adobe premiere