For example, The Last Of Us Part II is near 100 GB, but if I record the whole game (20 hours or so) in 4K, that video will be like 200-250 GB.
Can anyone explain why?
In: Technology
The data that is the game gives your system the information to build the world. As you play this world and everything in it is created. This creates a ton of media. Especially at high resolution. The longer you play the more media is produced even though it only took the amount of data in the game files to create it. Hope that helps.
*Textures* make up most of the data in a game. These are the bitmap images that get painted onto the game’s 3D models. Now imagine a very simple game that consists of nothing but doors and brick walls — always the same doors and always the same bricks. But the doors and walls can be rendered from any angle, and the map can be configured in any number of ways. So in a video-capture of the game, every frame will be unique, even though the game’s internal data is nothing but a single image of a door and a single image of some bricks.
It’s two completely different ways of showing things to you.
The first is a game. An honest to god, interactive experience. It has a world that has to be generated, and the amount of data that can go into building it can be large. But, the process of showing you the scene is generated dynamically. The game will take all that pre-existing data, and depending on what you’re doing in-game, it will show you a sequence of frames that look like motion. This doesn’t take any extra space to do — it’s just building more images based on what it already has to create everything.
The other way is a video file. This is a vastly different medium. It’s not interactive. It has no idea what kind of content it holds inside… it’s just a bunch of compressed data. The bigger the resolution, and the longer the video, the more data is necessary to show you a sequence of frames to create the video. It doesn’t have the ability to use the pre-existing data that the game originally had to recreate the scene for you to see — it has to do that without any context. There are a lot of compression tricks used to keep the file size smaller for videos, but at some point, if you record for long enough, you’ll need more space than the original game takes up.
As someone who has worked with C-100s, Canons, Arri and Bolex film cameras, Sony, and some others, I’m not quite sure myself, there. I know it has to do with the information that is being processed to create the dynamic range of color and detail. If you’re recording audio, that adds a few GBs, but nothing crazy. Often, camera settings will include other file information, so instead of recording *one* take of your playthrough, you’re actually recording “multiples” because there are other files created, along with the video files.
Still, the main 4K video file is rather large in comparison with these other files that are made. I want to say–if memory serves me correctly–that in order to create moving images, you’re actually recording +/- 24-30 frames per second. Instead of being a manageable 4:3, with 4K you’re getting your movie-standard 16:9 aspect ratio. So, right there you’ve just added a slew of information that has to be processed and put together.
After that, there’s all of the actual information that the camera sees. I believe the process to create 4K footage uses additional alpha channels, which creates a heavier file.
Essentially, if I remember my teaching correctly, the files are compressed data at 24-30 times. Instead of a single 4KHD image, there are 24-30 per second. (60s x 60m) x 2h = 7,200 large files composed of–on average–30 large files = 216,000 large files.
From there, it’s something to do with each file having to retain its information–i.e. each of the 216,000 large files–versus a coded game that presents the information, essentially, through characters arranged a certain way. Instead of having a specific code that says “Joe is caucasian,” video files carry layers of code that say “this is green,” “this is red,” “this is blue,” “this is white,” “this is black,” “this is magenta,” “this is yellow,” etc., to create Joe, who is a caucasian.
Now, don’t quote me. It’s been a while since I’ve been taught all of this. I hope it makes sense.
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I write a simple program. It creates a file, writing ones and zeroes to that file indefinitely. This program has thus created another file bigger than itself. There is no reason that this would be impossible.
Games generate the pixels onscreen. They do it in a more complex manner, but the basic idea is the same. Recording each of these pixels takes up more space than the program that produced them.
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A game very similar to a book in this aspect.
The textures have to be saved only once and then there is a lot of instructions on how to put them together. So a palm tree like a letter is saved in the files and then placed around the map, like on the pages of a book. The game only needs to remember the textures of the palm tree once and then the places where you want it.
Now recording footage is something completely different. That is like taking a full picture up to 60 times a second and storing the complete picture, without having a clue what even is on the picture. A computer makes no difference on what is on the picture, he just saves the data of color of each pixel and that is it.
When we talk about data, video is pretty much the most complicated and biggest thing you can have. One letter can be as small as 1 Byte of data up to maybe 4 Bytes. A single pixel of a picture is 3 Bytes big and you have millions of them every picture and up to 60 pictures per second.
Now you can save some data on pictures by compressing them, but a video simply is the recording of where which color was at what moment, and that takes a lot of information.
A computer game is a big smart and complex machine, but for that is has to interpret the instructions with the small graphics that were given and for that it needs a graphics card.
So it basically is the difference between somebody reading the story of a book, for which he needs a “brain” that can do the necessary calculations and the other one just knowing what every page looked like by remembering each pixel and drawing a picture of it so you can read it yourself.
The best reason I could see is because the game probably reuses certain assets, possibly just re-skinned.
Like enemy 1 and enemy 2 are actually equal, just colored different. The same with some buildings and grass, that sort of idea. Think of older games from the 80s and 90s where a stronger enemy is just a different color palette. A lot of that was to save storage space.
Now when you record something nothing is reused, enemy 1 and enemy 2 are both unique pixels that take up equal space.
There’s also the fact that there might not be 20 hours of straight up assets. I’m not sure how to explain this well… but you have to sit and play the game which would take longer than if you just looked at each asset of a game and were done.
Sort of like let’s say everything in the game was in one map and you beat it in 30 minutes. The game would be the same size but your video would be significantly smaller.
A good example of this too is Resident Evil 7. Game is only 20 gigs but unless you speed rum it, it’ll probably take you 10 hours and a larger video than game.
Because their different kinds of data.
In games its all assets like models, texture maps and music. These can all be used multiple times for basically the same amount of data.
Whereas video is basically 1000s of snapshots, having to designate every pixels colour and brightness every frame (not to mention sound.) The size of which is dictated by how long you record.
Its the same way that a video of a photo would be larger in filesize than the photo.
Here is a simple program/problem:
y = 1 + x, write down the values of y for x ranging from 1 to 1000
Now try writing out the answer (mentally anyway!)
You can easily see that the answer/output is far longer than the program used to create that answer/output. Similarly a game is a program that does a lot of calculations and the results are numbers used to drive the monitor and the speaker etc etc. The output can be far larger than the program. There is no reason to expect the program to be smaller, equal to or larger than the output it creates.
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