Numbers To Know hard
How large is 1 minute of uncompressed (RAW 8-bit RGBA) 4K video (3840x2160) at 60fps?
- A 1 GB
- B 100 MB
- C approximately 120 GB
- D approximately 1 TB
Answer: C. approximately 120 GB
Uncompressed 4K video is exceptionally dense. A single 4K frame (3840x2160) at 8-bit RGBA depth takes up about 33 MB ($3840 \times 2160 \times 4 \text{ bytes}$). At 60 frames per second, that's almost 2 GB of data *every second*. For a full minute, you would need ~120 GB of storage. This calculation illustrates why video codecs like H.264 or AV1 are so critical; they use sophisticated mathematics to compress this 120 GB down to about 400 MB (a 300:1 ratio) with almost no noticeable loss in quality, making the modern streaming internet possible.
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