Movies

Unlike an animation that we can create from drawings or images a movie is created by a photographic process and converted or ported to a computer so each frame has data stored in every pixel. As we discussed in the animation lesson, a computer's resources can be sorely taxed by dense video and movies have the added element of sound making things even more difficult. You already know the basics of computer generated movies because they are no more than an array of still images synchronized with a sound file. The synchronization is accomplished using key frames and the playback computer's onboard clock.

Movie size on disk and in memory depends upon the video playback window size, the frame rate (how many frames are played in each second), the audio sample rate and size and the codec used to encode the file.

Below is a table representing a 30 second clip from a movie captured from VHS saved at various sizes with different codecs and settings.