What survives being re-encoded

Two entries address durability and they reach opposite conclusions about their own layer: one states that its watermark is designed to survive cropping, filters, frame-rate changes and lossy compression; the other warns that re-exporting through an editor removes the metadata it writes. As of 2026-09-12.

Inclusion rule. Entries whose public pages say anything about durability. Silence is recorded as not addressed rather than as fragile. Order. Entries that publish a durability statement first.

1These two are describing different layers, not disagreeing

A watermark embedded in the pixels and a field written into the container behave completely differently under re-encoding. The first has to be attacked to be removed; the second disappears when a tool rewrites the file without copying it across. Both statements can be true at once because they are about different places in the same file.

The reason to put them on one page is that they are routinely quoted as if they were comparable claims about the same thing. They are not, and a reader who merges them ends up expecting metadata to be robust or expecting a pixel watermark to be strippable by a re-export.

2A durability claim is only as good as the attacks it names

Cropping, filters, frame-rate changes and lossy compression is a specific list, and lists like that describe ordinary handling rather than deliberate removal. Nothing published claims the scheme survives someone trying to defeat it, and reading that in would be inventing a stronger claim than the vendor made.

This site records the list as given. It does not test it, and it does not rank it against anything, because there is nothing else in the record making a comparable claim.

3The practical advice both statements point at

Whatever the file leaves the generator with, an edit suite is where it is most likely to be lost. That is true of metadata for certain, because one of the vendors here says so, and it is the step a production controls rather than the one a vendor does.

Which is a workflow observation rather than a finding about products, and it is the only one on this page that applies regardless of which generator was used.

• Metadata
  The guide tells publishers to keep whatever content credentials or generation metadata the tool writes, and warns that re-encoding can strip themdescribed but not enumeratedSceneMixer, compliance guide / recorded 2026-09-12
• Robustness
  Designed to stand up to cropping, added filters, changed frame rates and lossy compressionas stated by the vendorGoogle DeepMind, SynthID / recorded 2026-09-12

4Sources

Every line is read from the vendor pages listed on the support table, checked 2026-09-12. What earns a row is set out in the protocol. Nearby: Checking a file, At which step, Two marks at once.