Re video's "studio swing" dynamic range, the YUV components do have a different encoding range to those in JPEG, but if you expand them back out to 0-255 the image is in fact the same - you lose a lil' fraction of your bit-depth but no dynamic range.
I think you definitely made the right choice though - it's interesting that the obvious delta-coding and motion compensation tricks to reduce bandwidth are rarely used for video acquisition apart from the most limited devices like phones, stills cameras and the GoPro. Everything that can afford to uses per-frame coding like ProRes, REDCODE, AVC-Intra, DNxHD, Cineform... being able to seek quickly is important!
In fact Canon's 1DC 4k camera uses (dun dun duhhhhh...) motion JPEG :)
I think you definitely made the right choice though - it's interesting that the obvious delta-coding and motion compensation tricks to reduce bandwidth are rarely used for video acquisition apart from the most limited devices like phones, stills cameras and the GoPro. Everything that can afford to uses per-frame coding like ProRes, REDCODE, AVC-Intra, DNxHD, Cineform... being able to seek quickly is important!
In fact Canon's 1DC 4k camera uses (dun dun duhhhhh...) motion JPEG :)