From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Small file, big picture: What is video compression?

Small file, big picture: What is video compression?

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

Small file, big picture: What is video compression?

- [Instructor] When a picture or sound information is in its raw state, it's big. It's really, really very big. Just regular HD video is 1,920 pixels by 1,080, and that's 2,073,600 pixels. In digital stills camera terms, it's about 2 Megapixels. But remember, there are three color channels for each pixel. Whether the color information is RGB or YUV, it's still three 8-bit numbers, even for the most basic, standard 8-bit video. So we're actually talking about 6,220,800 monochrome pixels, and each one of those monochrome pixels is 8-bits. So now, we're at 49,766,400 bits. That's individual ones and zeros, and this is for a single frame. Multiply that by 24 frames per second, which is just about the minimum anyone uses, and we have an enormous 1,194,393,600 bits for every second of video. In case your curious, that's 4,777,574,400 binary bits for UHD. It's a lot of ones and zeros to store, transmit, playback and display. Codecs compress this amount of information into something more…

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