> In other words: the AV1 encoder in your example works by finding 47GBs of data TO DELETE.

With that reasoning, lossless compression of .wav to .flac destroys >50% of data.

In actuality, you can reconstruct much of the source even with lossy compression. Hell, 320kbps mp3 (and equivalent aac, opus, etc) are indistinguishable from lossless and thus aurally transparant to humans, meaning as far as concerns us, there is no data loss.

Maybe one day we'll get to the point where video compression is powerful enough that we get transparent lossy compression at the bit rates streaming services are offering us.

> In my experience, this often deletes purposeful noise out of animation

AV1 specifically analyzes the original noise, denoises the source then adds back the noise as a synthetic mask / overlay of sorts. Noise is death for compression so this allows large gains in compression ratio.

> AV1 specifically analyzes the original noise, denoises the source then adds back the noise as a synthetic mask / overlay of sorts. Noise is death for compression so this allows large gains in compression ratio.

If said noise still exists after H265.

And there's no guarantee that these noise detection algorithms are compatible with H264, H265, AV1, or future codecs H266 or AV2.