The first part of this issue will then look at the question of just how many bytes are in a piece of digital video. Digital, by the numbers We will open with an example which is based on a digitized NTSC picture. We will use a horizontal digitization of 640 samples per line and a vertical resolution of 480 lines. But this is digital video, and digital recording things store bytes, so we must now convert the number to bytes. It wasn't that long ago when a 20 megabyte hard disk held all of the programs and data a person could ever want.
Storage space is now, apparently, a potentially large problem.
All this makes compression look a bit more desirable. I was going to also get into reading and writing data at speeds such as 20 megabytes per second, but that will be reserved for another time. The first, most obvious and most popular solution to the storage of these massive amounts of data is simple - don't store all of the data. The problem comes in deciding what data to not store. I will try to describe some of the solutions in use today, and I'll attempt to hold my opinions to a minimum.