Data rate ex1 and FCP

[Craig Seeman]

Please look again.
One of my peeves is that people really have to have basic math skills.
35megabits/second is 4.375MegaBytes/second.
Mb or mb is megabit
MB megabyte

Please be literate in your profession or you’re going to dig yourself and coworkers into deep workflow holes.

[Ian Cook]

lol, yes, it would be nice if everyone used the same system…FCP reads out the data rate in MegaBYTES per second while most video data rates are expressed in terms of MegaBITS per second. A bit is one data character, a byte is 8, so when you see data rates that low (or ‘MB’ instead of ‘Mb’) typically you just multiply the # by 8..

this comes up CONSTANTLY with XDCAM VBR codecs; it’s probably in the top 25 support questions our team gets. “why is my data rate only 4 Mb per second!?!”

[Don Greening]

[Craig Seeman] “Please be literate in your profession or you’re going to dig yourself and coworkers into deep workflow holes.”

I usually remove all doubt and use the terms Mbit or Mbyte, as most people unfamiliar with or unwilling to learn the differences don’t know the subtleties of Mb or MB. Personally, I think it looks more like a typo than anything else.

– Don

Don Greening
A Vancouver Video Production Company
Reeltime Videoworks
http://www.reeltimevideoworks.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Don Greening] “I usually remove all doubt and use the terms Mbit or Mbyte”

The problem is one has to understand what the various programs use and many often use Mb and MB or some variation rather than bit or byte.

Compounding this further is Decimal vs Binary expressions as well that aren’t self evident. Mac users went through that when Apple changed storage measures in the update to Snow Leopard.

[Don Greening]

With that in mind, when I’m explaining such things to people with less experience I’ll go the extra step by using Mb (Mbit) and MB (Mbyte) at the same time.

– Don

Don Greening
A Vancouver Video Production Company
Reeltime Videoworks
http://www.reeltimevideoworks.com