Compression Basics


Tutorial Home >Music and Video >Digital Music >Archiving Digital Multimedia >How do I learn more about compression?
Tutorial Home >Music and Video >Digital Video >Archiving Digital Multimedia >How do I learn more about compression?
Tutorial Home >Music and Video >Digital Music >Archiving Digital Multimedia >Compression >Compression Basics
Tutorial Home >Music and Video >Digital Video >Archiving Digital Multimedia >Compression >Compression Basics

  Step 1:  Reasons for compression

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One frame of broadcast video (720x486x24) requires just over 8 megabytes to store. There are 30 frames per second. That's 240 megabytes every second. Unless you have a terabyte disk farm, you need a way to reduce the size of your files.
  Step 2:  More reasons for compression

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While you may not be storing video files, other graphic files can consume huge amounts of disk space. Compressing them will allow more images to fit on the archive media.
  Step 3:  Types of compression

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There are two basic types of compression, "lossy" and "lossless".
  Step 4:  Lossy Compression

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Lossy compression actually throws away data and reconstructs it upon playback based on an algorithm that samples the remaining data.
  Step 5:  Lossless Compression

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Lossless compression simply looks for redundancies in the data and replaces them with a shortened code. When rebuilt, the file is the same as the original.