This paper presents the investigation carried out for the MetaVision project in the area of lossless compression for digital cinema. The goal of this investigation was to identify, among the many approaches, the one that is most suited to the MetaVision requirements. An extensive simulation campaign has thus identified JPEG-2000 as the best compromise between efficiency, standardization and lossy-to-lossless performance. This result was hardly predictable, especially because of the peculiar kind of material to be coded.