Finns Blog: Learning about media compresion

Hello, in todays blog I am going to be going over the topic of media compression. Media compression is when you lower the size and quality in different areas of a video in order to make the file size of the photo or video smaller so that it can be accessed online much easier and for a wider audience. Before watching these videos I already had a decent knowledge with media compression as I have done photography in the past as well as experience with audio files. I will be talking about some of the ways that compression works and can be used.

First I will talk about compression in relation to video quality. Videos have a wide variety of quality that they can be rendered in each having their own strengths and weaknesses. The most commonly known video qualities that are seen on online websites like YouTube.

The higher qualities are 2160p 4K which is the highest quality available on the site. Others like 1440p and 1080p are in HD. Once you go lower than 720p on YouTube to for example 480p and below go from 60 frames per second down to 30 frames per second. The downside to high quality videos is that the higher the quality, the more strong of a connection that you need to stop it from buffering and the files are usually quite large. By having the video quality lower you need a less powerful internet connection and file sizes are much lower but compromise the quality of video.

Compression is also present with audio files. The most common file format for audio files like music is MP3. MP3 are a small size file that can retain a high quality with minimal quality loss. However if you drop your MP3 quality from for example 320k down to a lower MP3 quality like 60k you loose a considerable amount of quality and sound can sound distorted and hollow.

Another area where compression is present is in photos. The highest quality file for photos are in raw mode in a camera. These files are very large because of their high detail but can be compressed to much smaller file sizes like JPEG. JPEG images are very small in size but can retain a decent quality but when you zoom into the image you can really see where the quality has been compromised. Although JPEG are no where near as high quality as a raw file, they can be downloaded and uploaded around the internet very easily while raw files can sometimes not be able to be uploaded to websites because the file is too big.