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It's not a given though I imagine. For audio for example you could discard inaudible parts of the spectrum and compress the rest losslessly. In this case only the first round is lossy and it doesn't degrade over time. But I'm not sure the same exists for images.

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In the VFX industry you don't roundtrip lossy codecs; first step is to decode to something lossless like EXR or TIFF, and those are what you pipe through your workflows. (With maybe lowres JPEG "proxies" to make iteration a bit quicker.)

Film/TV more generally I think tolerates slightly lossy codecs like RED or Pro Res, as there's often only 1-2 intermediate steps that could cause extra loss. (E.g. the part of editing that is just 'cutting' is pass-through, but color-grading would require a second encoding step.)

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