One of the overriding constraints on these sorts of video pipeline tasks is touching the input pixels as few times as possible. Every lossy transformation you d

One of the overriding constraints on these sorts of video pipeline tasks is touching the input pixels as few times as possible. Every lossy transformation you do (cropping, scaling, color correction, transcoding) potentially introduces defects; and that's assuming that your lossless transformations (repackaging container formats, for instance) are bug-free. I'd love to see some figures from Netflix' QC team; I bet at their scale they see all kinds of insane edge case problems.