Tuesday, July 14, 2009 byAl Falaschi

As I field questions from potential customers about adding video to their digital asset management system, I tend to field the same type of question. “I have a QuickTime file. Is that good?” That is really a loaded question. The next statement is….”It is 100 Megabytes. Is that good?”

I will attempt to explain how video bandwidth is the intersection where time length avenue and storage size street cross. Unlike an image file, video is a time-based media. It not only has a resolution, but it has a time length, over which the resolution is maintained. Compression is used to help keep quality up and files size down, but that is for another blog topic.

“Storage” is static….a 100 MB video file sitting in your video asset management system is much like a one gallon bucket of water sitting on a counter. “Bandwidth” has motion to it. If the video is 1 minute long, and you are watching it online, your internet connection (or pipe) will have exactly 60 seconds to pull through 100 MB of data. If we think of the water in the bucket, we will poor that water into the sink. The opening of the drain will need to be wide enough to let exactly 1 gallon of water through its opening in 60 second. Anything less will result in stuttered playback of the video.

Continues @ http://blog.widen.com

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