You can find more compression settings articles in our Supercharging Compressor series index.

You can be plenty good at video work if you only know that bigger bitrates are usually better — but if you’re going to be a guru when it comes to the quality of your video output, it’s worth taking a closer look at the concept from the ground up.

Luckily, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Let’s take NTSC video as our example: 30 frames per second, each 720 pixels wide and about 480 high.  Each broadcast-safe pixel, in RGB space, could take up 235 values for each color (red green and blue), so it needs 24 bits of information to describe it.  If we were to try to store a second of NTSC-type video completely uncompressed using this bitmap scheme, we would need

30 * 720 * 480 * 24 = 248,832,000 bits, or about 30MB — per second!

Try slapping THAT on YouTube — or a DVD, for that matter.

Read more from: http://www.geniusdv.com/

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Digital Filmmaking, Final Cut, Post Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.