Does Linus's team use video compression?

[Feriman]

I mean, there's a huge size difference between H.264 and H.265+, and they should definitely be compressing their videos (if they're not already). I've seen a lot of videos of them upgrading their storage because they're running out. This could solve (or slow down) the "out of storage" problem.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Basically every video format these days is compressed so yes.

 

For the current project editing server, you want high quality footage, and in easy to edit formats which aren't the most efficent for editing. You don't typically want to edit h.264/h.265 if you don't have to.

 

I think LTT wants to keep an archive of near full quality or camera orginals for all files, and that will take a lot of space. As they have said many times this is a nice to have not a need to have storage.

 

 

[manikyath]

i'm not gonna dig trough the hours of "workflow" videos from LTT, but afaik they do somewhat compress, but actual H264/265 compression sort of takes away the benefit of using such good cameras.

 

afaik the process is around this:

- they record stuff, in RAW or near-raw quality.

- it goes trough a round of conversion to a format their video production workflow works best with.

- the video gets produced

- this gets exported in some *stupid big size that is easy for the workstations to export*

- this export then gets crunched by the render server to the desired output files for the vareous platforms.

 

as for the vault, i'm not sure if they actually keep the stupid high bitrate stuff or not, but LMG just records a crap ton of video each day, and no matter how much you compress it, it just keeps growing.

[Erioch]

Weird to assume you can do their job better than they can.  Especially since you know nothing about how they do it.

[Feriman]

@Erioch I did not say that I know better how they should do it, I just asked a question

[Erioch]

"Just asking questions"

[Avocado Diaboli]

You want as little compression as possible on your source files, because once you introduce lossy compression, which all the formats you've listed are, you're not getting back that information. That's what's worth keeping around. The edited output that you upload to YouTube is negligible in size compared to all the stuff that gets shot. Even though LMG reportedly use a mezzanine workflow (typically understood to be what @manikyath described, where you first transcode the footage to a codec that the editing software has an easier time with), you typically don't want to introduce too much compression at that stage either.

 

Second, even with all the compression in the world, they would still need to expand their amount of storage periodically, given that they're still producing new content, so this is just kicking the can down the road at best. There is no solving the "out of storage" problem short of freeing up that storage and deleting files.

[manikyath]

4 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Second, even with all the compression in the world, they would still need to expand their amount of storage periodically, given that they're still producing new content, so this is just kicking the can down the road at best. There is no solving the "out of storage" problem short of freeing up that storage and deleting files

i recall hearing somewhere they were looking into sticking stuff on tape, which is costly initially, but when the workflow is done right you essentially have infinite expandability for fairly low cost and volume per TB.