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Uncompressed and pixel resolution.
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This has been an interesting thread. Usually, I am the most pedantic person in the room, but I might have lost that distinction in this thread. I mean that as a compliment!
Some of the discussion going back and forth here is why I talk about uncompressed in the context of the individual stages of a workflow, and not the entire workflow itself.
Acquisition is almost always compressed.
From there, you have varying degrees of compression in capture, editorial, effects, grading, finishing, and delivery. Any of these steps may be uncompressed, losslessly compressed, lightly compressed, or heavily compressed.
I think it is still meaningful to talk about an uncompressed workflow, even when acquisition was a compressed format, because it suggests that ingest and editorial has not degraded the acquired footage in any way. This is especially important and meaningful with involved effects pipelines.
[Thomas Morter-Laing] “Uncompressed is to do with subsampling? (ie, anything which is less than 444 is NOT uncompressed HD)- so in theory “Uncompressed HD comes in lots of varieties of codecs etc? How is it normally wrapped? What bitrate does it need to be to be classed as uncompressed?”
To try to answer your original question practically, “uncompressed HD” usually refers to a full-raster HD video file encoded with an uncompressed codec (from Apple, AJA, BMD, etc.). My fourth-grade English teacher would chide me for defining a word with itself, but I think part of the problem here is that we are treating uncompressed as a general adjective instead of the specific codec that is in this context.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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Dave,
“Everybody’s gonna need loans for new 128 TB, 800 mbs arrays. FCP will have to go 64-bit. Apple will have to license Adobe/NVidia Cuda technology.”No, not everybody, at least for now. Only those that either suffer from compression-phobia, think ‘uncompressed’ gives their work cred, or the very few that their workflow/product could justify such a system. Maybe for some type of FX, or such.
But seriously, I’m sure you remember when a 100 meg HD was a big deal. Now anything less than 1TB is passe’. So your 128TB, 800mbs array might not be that far off in the future. And you might not even need a loan.
Who knows what will be in 5 years, but at some point we will be capable of recording more info than the viewer can perceive, even when the frame is blown up to drive-in size screens. What will be the point of increasing beyond that? For the average viewer, we may already be there now, or close to it.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.comI have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
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It has been my understanding that uncompressed is not a codec. Since a codec stands for compression/decompresson and the idea behind uncompressed files is that they are easier on the processor because they don’t have to be decompressed. No codec, no decompression. Of course they’re pretty taxing on hard drives and other bandwidth bottlenecks. And as far as the color subsampling thing goes, is that compression? IOW, does it take a codec and algorithm of sorts to subsample color? Or is it just every other pixel or something? But none of this is my expertise. Just my funky way of trying to understand it.
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[Bret Williams] “It has been my understanding that uncompressed is not a codec. Since a codec stands for compression/decompresson and the idea behind uncompressed files is that they are easier on the processor because they don’t have to be decompressed.”
Is it compression/decompression or coder/decoder? I’ve heard the etymology go either way. With that being said, I think ‘Uncompressed’ has to be a codec, in some sense of the term, because the incoming video signal has to be encoded into a file format that the software can read.-Andrew
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