And can it be altered to increase image quality?
In: Technology
Compression algorithms.
You can have a video where each frame is stored exactly like it is, with a perfect representation of 0’s and 1’s. This is a “raw” file format. The video quality is perfect, but unfortunately the file sizes are huge, so they become impractical.
But you can compress the video using smart algorithms to retain the image quality but still reduce the number of 0’s and 1’s. For example, hypothetically if a movie was just 2 hours of complete darkness, it would be a waste to store millions of frames of black, when you can just store *one* of those frames, and then tell the computer to repeat the frame a million times.
Then there is lossy compression techniques where you reduce the image quality, for example by lowering the resolution or color data. This usually saves a lot of memory, but the quality is tarnished and cannot be reconstructed perfectly.
It’s an entire science, and today’s compression algorithms are really clever and can save a huge amount of data at a minimal loss of quality.
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