International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Because all video compression schemes introduce artifacts into the compressed video images, degradation occurs. These artifacts, generated by a wavelet-based compression scheme, will vary with the compression ratio and input imagery, but do show some consistent patterns across applications. There are a number of design trade-offs that can be made to mitigate the effect of these artifacts. By understanding the artifacts introduced by video compression and being able to anticipate the amount of image degradation, the video compression can be configured in a manner optimal to the application under consideration in telemetry.