A Stern and Source-Cited Admonition to Mr. Mason Concerning the Ever-Expanding Universe of Digital File Sizes
Mr. Mason,
It has become distressingly clear that your understanding of digital file sizes, particularly concerning video, is rooted in a distant digital past. You cling to the antiquated notion that video files are inherently small, a belief so outdated it’s practically a museum piece. Your frame of reference, it seems, is stuck somewhere around 2004, a time when a “large” video file might have been a few megabytes. Let me assure you, Mr. Mason, the digital world has not merely changed; it has undergone a Cambrian explosion of data.
You persist in the assertion that no video file can be very large, a claim so divorced from reality it’s almost performance art. Your experience with photography, limited as it is to a decade-old phone camera (a relic of a bygone digital era), has demonstrably, and detrimentally, impacted your understanding of modern video recording. While I appreciate your apparent fondness for the low-resolution charm of early mobile phone snapshots, this does not qualify you as an expert on the gigabytes and terabytes of data produced by contemporary video cameras.
Let’s ground this in some verifiable facts, shall we? In 2004, digital cameras typically captured images at resolutions of a few megapixels, resulting in JPEG files of a few megabytes each. Video, if available at all, was low resolution and heavily compressed. As Britannica notes regarding digital photography in its early years, “The relatively small size of the image files made digital photography appealing to amateur photographers.” While they don’t specify video, the implication of “small file size” was certainly relevant to the compressed video formats of the time. These files might have been a few megabytes per minute. An hour of such footage might have been a few hundred megabytes, a significant storage demand at the time.
Fast forward to the present. A modern GoPro HERO10, a camera you specifically seem to misunderstand, can record video in resolutions up to 5.3K at 60 frames per second. These files, Mr. Mason, are not small. They are gargantuan. A single minute of 5.3K footage can consume hundreds of megabytes, often exceeding a gigabyte. An hour of such footage? We’re talking 60 gigabytes or more. That’s not a typo. Sixty gigabytes. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the equivalent of the entire hard drive of a mid-range computer from 2004. As explained on GoPro’s own website, “Higher resolutions and frame rates result in larger file sizes.” This is not some secret knowledge; it’s basic information readily available to anyone willing to look.
And it’s not just GoPros. Professional video cameras used in filmmaking and broadcasting can generate terabytes of data per hour. These files are often uncompressed or minimally compressed to preserve image quality, resulting in massive file sizes. A feature-length film, shot in high resolution, can easily generate dozens, even hundreds, of terabytes of data. As an example, the BBC’s guidelines for HD broadcasts stipulate data rates that result in several gigabytes per hour of programming.
Your continued insistence that video files are small is not just wrong; it’s a profound misunderstanding of the exponential growth of digital data. I implore you, Mr. Mason, to step out of your time warp and embrace the reality of modern digital imaging. The world of high-definition video, with its gigabytes and terabytes of data, is not a myth. It’s real. And it’s time you acknowledged it. Perhaps a visit to the local electronics store, or even a cursory glance at online reviews of modern cameras, would be beneficial.
