I like to use Big Buck Bunny, because it is completely free in terms of copyright and licensing. All the source files are provided, so you can generate an arbitrary resolution movie. Thankfully xiph.org has taken the time to render all the frames in 1080p in an uncompressed png format. The audio is also offered in 5.1 lossless flac format.
Here’s a test run for the first 15 seconds of the movie into a completely lossless ffv1 video codec and flac audio vodec avi.
$ ffmpeg -t 15 -r 24 -f image2 -i BBB/BBB-1080-png/big_buck_bunny_%05d.png \ -i BBB/BigBuckBunny-stereo.flac -vcodec ffv1 -s 1280x720 test.avi
The result however is difficult to play, because of the immense amount of data that needs to be read off of the hard drive. I need to try reading this off a RAID or a solid state drive.
video stats
- frames: 14315
- fps: 24
- duration: 9:56.5 minutes
- bytes for video (uncompressed): 89,050,752,000
- bytes for frames (lossless compression): ~30,292,344,000
- bytes per frame (uncompressed): 6,220,800
- average bytes per frame (lossless compression): ~2,116,100
- video bitrate (uncompressed): 1,194,393,600
- video bitrate (lossless compression): ~406,296,196
audio stats
- 48000 Hz
- 24 bit
- bytes for stereo audio (uncompressed): 229,040,000
- bytes for stereo audio (lossless compression): ~150,000,000
- audio bitrate per channel: 1,536,000
- audio bitrate per channel(lossless compression): ~1,005,900
| Uncompressed | Lossless compression | Lossy compression | |
| Video (mbps) | 1,194.4 | 406.3 | 10 |
| Audio (kbps) | 1536.0 | 1005.9 | 192 |
It’s a factor of 3 to go from uncompressed video to lossless, then another factor 0f 40 for lossy.
It’s a factor of 1.5 to go from uncompressed audio to lossless, then another factor of 5 for lossy.
Video might have compressed more since this is a computer generated animation. 90 gigs uncompressed to 30.5 gigs lossless to 800 megs lossy. lossy compression is very important if you want filesizes to be manageable. I have to applaud the creators of these various codecs for being so effective. If I actually tried to encode the video with a lossless codec (ffv1), I would probably get more than a factor of 3 compression.