Thought leadership articles by IABM and our members
Articles taken from IABM's journal and at show papers
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Imagine a sponge or rather thousands of sponges to be transported over several kilometers. It would require several trucks to store and transport them all!
Let’s take all those sponges and squeeze them. If you look closely at the sponge, you will see that it has lots of holes in it, filled with air. When you squeeze it, you remove the air which is useless and the entire sponge takes up less space.
Over the last 20 years, the number of shared images and videos has considerably increased. In terms of resolution, we have moved from SD, HD to 4K – even 8K – and this is not about to stop. Higher frame rates, higher resolutions, more precision and higher dynamic range (HDR) imply a considerable increase in the amount of data to be transported on our networks. Bandwidth and storage are getting cheaper but this does not compensate the drastic increase of data to be transported or stored. Compression is therefore more than ever a fundamental step in distributing your video over the internet.
Every color pixel in a digital image is created through some combination of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Each primary color is often referred to as a “color channel” or “color component”, and has a range of intensity values specified by its bit depth. The bit depth for each primary color is termed the “number of bits per channel”, typically ranging from 8 to 16bits. The “bits per pixel” (bpp) refers to the sum of the “number of bits per color channel” i.e. the total number of bits required to code the color information of the pixel.
An uncompressed RGB image with a bit depth of 8 bits per color will have 24 bpp or 24 bits per pixels (8 bits for the Red, 8 bits for the Green, 8 bits for the Blue)
Technology improves constantly, internet connections get better and faster, but in conjunction, video resolutions get higher and files exponentially bigger! Compression is more than ever a requirement to distribute your video.
Over the last 20 years, resolution and frame rates have moved from SD (@24fps), to HD, then 4K (@60fps), now reaching 8K (@120fps) and will likely keep increasing. Thanks to all these improvements, we are entertained with better images and videos, and machine vision algorithms (AI, Analytics) can make better decisions.
Higher frame rate, higher resolution, more bit per pixel (or precision) and higher dynamic range (HDR) imply a considerable increase in the amount of data to be transported, recorded and processed.