Nice Codec Article Link Here!

[gunug]

I'm stuck researching a work problem at home due to a way to restrictive firewall in place at work.  Anyway I'm trying to figure out why, even though the required codec files are downloaded and in place they're not being used.  This is neither here nor there because what I wanted to talk about here was a very nice detailed article here about codec files:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=&CIID=82898

QUOTE

Here’s a fun and jaw-dropping fact about digital video: At a post-production house, an uncompressed two-hour film in digital cinema resolution and quality will clock in at about 12 terabytes, less 9 to 18 gigabytes for the accompanying 16 channels of 48 or 96kHz audio.

Some of this can be explained away when you consider digital cinema’s 4096 x 2160 (or 4K) resolution, but the data rate is still monstrous – far too high for commercial cinemas to read and project, let alone store. This is why digital films are perfectly – or ‘losslessly’ – compressed to no more than 500GB, resulting in visually identical footage that requires a bit of decoding processor muscle.

Even after you account for the drop in resolution from 4K to 1080p, it’s still clear that no consumer format has enough space to deliver this kind of perfectly reproduced image quality. And that’s just the film – we haven’t even thought about the space needed for the extra features we’ve come to expect from our discs yet. This is where ‘lossy’ codecs come into play. They’re much more complex than lossless codecs, and we’ll examine them after we’ve looked at the basics of compression.

This is an Aussie site but shouldn't require much translation mate!

[krissel]

On similar subject, read this yesterday:

QUOTE

In Sony's Spider-Man 3, the two-minute "Birth of Sandman" sequence, which involved groundbreaking particle dynamics and control over individual grains of virtual sand, took up 37 terabytes of data. The entire Spider-Man 2 movie was only 4.5 terabytes, says Scott Stokdyk, visual effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks. While 40 minutes of Spider-Man 2 involved visual effects, the third film involved 70 minutes--or 930 visual effects shots.

QUOTE

Remember the scene in Shrek 2 where Prince Charming appears in a hair-tossing shampoo commercial? That took two months to complete, says Pearce. Improvements in processing speeds allowed a similar shot in Shrek the Third to take only five days.

But for some digital imaging specialists, the computers can't move fast enough. Steve Chapman, vice president of technology at Gentle Giant, a company that does 3-D scanning and models of real-life objects for use within digital animation (such as a 90-foot pirate ship in Pirates), says his company recently upgraded to Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Mac Pro with eight processor cores.

"That's not fast enough," he says. One scanned object can take more than four days to process, but at least today the job can be accomplished on an off-the-shelf computer rather than the Silicon Graphics supercomputers that were required in the 1980s.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/07/shrek-pir...artner=yahootix