So at this point, does there exist a color space that doesn't suffer from either issue?
I'll respond to myself. I have tentative evidence to say that there likely does exist such a color space, and I sure as hell didn't expect it to be widely available. This is a frame from Big Buck Bunny, encoded in YUV 4:2:0, and pushed through the reference Opus audio codec (libopus) at 8 kbps. The wraparound isn't intentional, but I think it adds to the VHS-like aesthetic. The ones next to it are the same thing using YUV 4:4:4, again with 24-bit RGB, and the original.
For the YUV color spaces:
Extreme loss of detail on all channels, check.
Colors retained despite that, check.
Unintentional artificial VHS look, check.
Oh, and the attribution? "The movie frames shown above are (c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation /
www.bigbuckbunny.org". Check. (Hey, between this and paying someone to use their stuff, I'd much prefer this)
Edit: I tentatively take it back. YUV spaces tend to do quite well with color preservation, at least when working with video and using lossy audio codecs. RGB 24-bit suffers from sudden color death. For Big Buck Bunny over there, the point of sudden color death is between 20 kbps and 20.5 kbps with libopus.
I wonder if 'abuse of lossy audio codecs' and 'generation loss by recursive re-recording' actually behave differently with respect to color spaces and color preservation under their respective forms of degradation.
The deviations from average brightness are high frequency and low amplitude, so I can see why they could get shaved off. You could just try encoding the color channels separately and then interleaving.
Wait, isn't that what interleaved RGB is? I'm having trouble trying to interpret what you mean. If I just induce exponential generation loss on this
here innocent picture...
And those are, left-to-right, the original, pass 1, pass 2, pass 4, pass 8, and pass 16. If you can see the hue shifting a bit, your eyes aren't fooling you. Interleaved images are pains-in-the-ass to deal with, precisely for this reason; they can sometimes shift hue by 30 degrees (rather than the 60 you'd expect from byte misalignment), which I didn't believe until I put some calibration bars on an earlier image.
It's doing pretty good color-wise given that's 16 iterations. If that's what you meant, that I'd agree.
Here's one I "baked" earlier: a planar RGB image. These are the
original, pass 1, 2, and 3.
It's not even on an exponential scale, and the color's still fading so damn hard. It's almost disheartening to see the color fade so quickly. A shame, too. I love working with planar images because they don't suffer from the hue-shifting issue that interleaved images do.