Submitted by Pocketcine on February 7, 2007 - 2:39am.
The focus of the Pocketcine project has been short videos that can be downloaded quickly and inexpensively over the air to cell phones.
The smaller the file size, the fewer bytes would flow over the air, triggering smaller carrier charges. Impatient mobile consumers will not be left tapping their toes, waiting for big video files to land on the storage media of their cell phones before playing. One of the main reasons why the world’s most successful viral mobile video, The Crazy Frog, is so widely distributed is that it is only about half a megabyte in size.
From the beginning my research told me that 3D animated shorts would compress most efficiently and live action video the least efficiently. Flash generated vector art and traditional hand-drawn animation would fall into the middle of the spectrum. In an upcoming blog, I’ll publish a primer on MPEG-4 compression so that you will understand the reasons why. However some of the main reasons are that a 3D animation does not have the sharp edges that compression algorithms don’t compress well, it has smoother and less random gradations, its color space works well with the compression algorithms, and the artist has more control over backgrounds and movement than possible with live action video.
