TEKnician wrote:There REALLY needs to be a class dedicated to learning digital video theories.
Someone asked me why their videos look horrible. I said to them:
"The video has to know where where each pixel and color has to go. Your computer threw out some of that info just to make the file size smaller. When you converted that YouTube video you found and downloaded it, the method you used threw out some data that said that pixels should be there."
"So how do I get a higher quality video from YouTube?"
"Just don't. It will never work."
Now this was a 60 year old lady. You think I'm gonna tell her how to actually get an HD video off of YouTube and onto her iPad?
The problem though is this: It's a LOT of freakin' info. Let's be honest here, how many of us took a fairly long time from 'square one' to 'totally knowing what we're doing'? Early on, how many things were you doing just because you were TOLD to do them in a tutorial, without knowing what it actually meant?
Sure, I can spew off 29.97 or 23.976 off the top of my head without thinking now, but few of my classmates could... But I'm the one who's seen those numbers a million times in the last twelve years.
I could never gain the knowledge I have in 2-3 years at school, with four months off in the summer. There's just too damn much. Heck, I'm still learning things. I only l earned that there was a world beyond 8 bit per channel RGBA this summer. Red cinema cameras, with wavelet compressed REDCODE RAW video, with 12 bits per channel? I havn't gotten to work with that kinda material beyond samples I've downloaded, but it blows away what you can do with YUV 4:2:0 8bpc crap we've been pulling off DVDs and Blu-Rays for AMVS. Even for photos, I can only use RAW 14bpc files as opposed to JPEGs after realizing how awesome raw data off the sensor is.