So for example, videogames are super heavy on disk space. And aparently most of that space is just the sounds, textures, models, etc. But the code takes very little space.
Why can something as complex as a physics system weight less than a bunch of images?
Code takes very little space, media takes more. But an image is just code that tells the computer how to draw something (I think)
So how come some code gets to be so small in size and some code doesn’t?
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“But an image is just code that tells the computer how to draw something (I think)”
Here’s the issue – the images and sounds that take a lot of space, aren’t that.
There are indeed images that are just “code” that the computer uses to draw them, and sounds that are just “code” that tells the computer what to play. Those are, indeed, pretty small. You can see this with vector images and midi files – they are small.
But “real” images, like photographs, and “real” sounds, like a recording of a voice, aren’t that simple – you can’t just have an instruction that tells the computer how to make it, because there’s no simple instruction, or set of instructions that can do that. They aren’t “regular”, for lack of a better word. It’s very easy to draw a line following instructions, you just need to say where point A and point B are, and the thickness. It’s nearly impossible to draw a realistic photograph using just instructions like that.
So these complex images and sounds have to be stored, in the case of images pixel by pixel (with each pixel taking a certain amount of bits to determine its color), and in the case of sound by samples (same idea). Video is just a series of images, so pick an image and multiply that by 30 per second, or whatever the framerate is.
Then you have compression algorithms that make it smaller, but there’s a limit to it, and there’s a heavy performance hit as well – the better the compression, usually the heavier it is on the cpu as well.
In the case of video, these compression algorithms are a requirement, since otherwise it would just be too big to work with. 99% of people never watch uncompressed video, unless you work in high end production, you never even get to see it. I’m a video editor, work on video all day long, and uncompressed is just not a thing in my workflow. To give you an idea, a simple 1080p (1920*1080 pixels) 24 bit uncompressed 60 fps video is around 3Gb PER SECOND. 24 bits for each pixel, times 2073600 pixels per frame, times 60 frames per second.
Working on a production codec, like Pro-res 422, which I use a lot, you’ll get around 150Mb per second for the same file, with next to no visual quality loss. Compressing that in h.265, which is what would be used for final distribution (youtube, etc.) will get you to about 9Mb per second – at the cost of processing power needed to decode it back on the fly, and a loss of visual accuracy (that is, usually, not very noticeable).
Taking that into account, I’d say video (and images and sound) take a surprisingly LOW amount of storage. The compression algo’s we use are incredible, you should expect media to take a LOT more space than it usually does.
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