TABLE OF CONTENTS Video file transfer is the process of transporting video and other content as data files, instead of as video streams. Commonly used during the production process, file transfer is similar to the process used daily by many IP network users when they send documents attached to e-mails. However, due to the extremely large size of many video content files, normal methods for file transfer (such as e-mail) won't work. In this chapter, we will discuss the specialized techniques that have been developed to transport large video files over IP networks.
Some of the largest data files sent over IP networks today are those that contain video content. This is no accident; the sheer amount of data that is needed to faithfully reproduce a high-quality video image is much greater than the amount of data in voice conversations or even in graphic-intensive web pages. Even when video content is highly compressed, the amount of data needed to represent an image on the viewer's display that changes 25 or 30 times each second occupies megabytes of disk space for every minute of video.
Video content files even for routine video production can be very large indeed. [1] A simple uncompressed Standard Definition video file can occupy 2 Gigabytes of disk space for every minute of footage. When high definition video is being used, uncompressed video occupies over 11 Gigabytes of storage for each minute. Data files for movie production are even larger; 40 or 50 Gigabytes of data per minute...
