Most people in the post-production and broadcast industry would state that compressed video is “bad” – and undoubtedly of significantly low(er) quality. As sophisticated as we are, demanding high quality in everything we do and see, we couldn’t agree more.
However, as reluctant you might feel about squeezed images, compression actually does have an upside: the higher the compression, the less space you need to store the video files or images. Plus, the smaller the compressed file, the faster it will travel through the network, requiring considerably less bandwidth during transfer than its uncompressed counterpart. So, is compression that bad after all? And what if the compression was literally lossless? Would you still demonize compression altogether?
Need more space?
With image resolutions constantly on the rise, and an increasing number of production and post-productions projects being processed in 2K, 4K and up, media storage capacity becomes very precious. While media storage actually becomes more and more affordable, bigger file formats bring a ton of baggage along though. “Simply adding more media storage” isn’t sufficient to handle large files, as both the maintenance and required bandwidth for transferring large files across the network become significantly more demanding.
Don’t boost the network – shrink the file!
We are glad to have found a technology partner that offers a highly professional and extremely efficient technology that helps to alleviate the problem. Pixspan’s PixMover™ provides bit-exact round trip encoding and decoding for handling full-resolution images, saving typically 50-80% of storage and networking resources. We have embedded the powerful software solution in all our server and storage appliances, providing post-production and broadcast facilities with increased real-time transfer speeds and substantially enhanced storage space usability. When using Pixspan’s container format, less space is required on the central storage, and less bandwidth is needed when transferring, hence the ability to move data significantly faster across the network.