A Startling Note on File Sizes

[A Side Project | How Much Is Too Much? | CHAPTER Markers | The Persistence of Memory - From Bytes to Gigabytes | On DVDs | A Film Reference, Conveniently Supplemented with a Link to YouTube | Some Distressing Figures | In the Far Future... | Dust to Dust]

When you make a habit of acquiring multimedia skills, it’s inevitable that someone will come along and draft you into engaging side projects. In the case of this afternoon (and well on into the evening), that group of someones was my family, and the project was making a DVD of my little sister’s recent performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So I’ve spent much of the day transferring that footage over to the computer and messing around with it in Final Cut. I was wary of cutting out a chunk of time for a different project, but I hoped it would shed some light on the DVD-making process, which will be a concern in my own work not far down the road. Like all things well-edited, it took much more time than it should have, and turned out twice as well as I had hoped.

At several points today, I decided Final Cut (the express version, no less) might be too powerful for its own good. It has a delightful function that allows you to add little triangular markers to the movie timeline you’re using, and if you turn them into CHAPTER markings (the all caps are definitely necessary) and import them into a piece of DVD-making software, they’ll automatically translate into DVD chapters, which saves you a lot of trouble. I’ve been coming across fantastic little tidbits like this one as I plow dutifully through the forty bazillion-page instruction manual that comes with the program, and I was thrilled to learn this.

Except there’s a slight problem. CHAPTER markers aren’t the only kind of markers out there. There are also REGULAR markers, and several other kinds. I paid as much attention to these decisions as I pay to the color of M&Ms I come up with when I dig in the bag — none at all. Apparently the markers are all color-coded, but I didn’t know this. I breezily whisked through the project, dotting appropriate segments with so many markers in so many colors that it began to resemble a parade float after a heavy confetti job. When I exported the file, I wound up with convenient shortcuts to scenes 3, 5, and (somehow) 9.5 — a marker I had let fall in the middle of a scene, cutting a startled monologue clean in half. Needless to say, I started over, and used only green markers: the only true CHAPTER markers, you see.

This is a convenient segue to my next point about multimedia work: these files are huge, and they take time to transfer. I don’t use the word “huge” lightly. We’re not talking about a pile of dirty dishes, or even a buffalo. When I exported the Midsummer movie from a project file into a standalone movie file, the end result was a file 25 gigabytes in size.

For those of you who don’t work with many files this size — or even some of you who do — I’ll try to put this in some kind of perspective. (If a person who actually knows what they’re doing stumbles across this layman’s discussion and finds it severely lacking, feel free to chime in with something that actually makes sense.) But, to basics: A “byte” is the smallest unit of measurement in computer memory. The smallest files are usually several thousand bytes, or “kilobytes.” The journal I kept this summer, a word document with more than 100 pages of text, takes up 470 KB of space. That’s nothing. That’s pocket change on today’s hard drives.

When you get a thousand bytes of data, you have a megabyte. Now we’re talking. Most users won’t see anything beyond a couple of megabytes of data — a standard song file saved as an mp3 will cost you somewhere between 3 and 5, maybe 7 megabytes. These stack up if you collect a lot of them, but not all that quickly, and you can buy an external hard drive to carry the load of your music library and photo albums pretty easily.

If you’re like me, and you tend to collect the entire discographies of certain artists (I’m currently on a quest to get all Tom Waits’ commercial releases, which will probably take the rest of my life), you might have an encounter with the gigabyte, a value approximately equivalent to a million bytes. (That’s apparently not quite true, but it will do for now; if you want a real horror show, check out the Wikipedia article on the gigabyte, which is enough to make any humanities major thank God that A.P. credits have saved him from taking math classes ever again). Most college students probably have several gigs of music on their hard drives.

Now. The file I uploaded for the Midsummer show is 25 gigabytes. It took 30 minutes to convert it from a project file in Final Cut to a movie. That meant I had time to go down and eat dinner with my family before the little bar filled up with blue and the progress window disappeared. Naively, I thought this was a long time to have to let a computer do something. Not an hour later, I found myself putting the finishing touches on a DVD of the performance, and I set the routine for burning it. The computer told me it would be finished with the project in 5 hours and 27 minutes.

Now, call me crazy. I probably should have seen this coming, with all the files I’d already put together. But my brain refused to comprehend that something could take this long to make. DVDs are those little discs you rent from Blockbuster when you’re at home on a break from college. You put them in your machine, and your machine plays them. Movies aren’t work. They’re entertainment.

Tell that to my computer, which says there are still almost four hours of furious data crunching between me and the production of one DVD of my sister’s performance.

It reminds me, in a rather disheartening way, of that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where an elaborate tower of pulleys, funnels, tubes, nozzles, eyedroppers and wheels churns through a minutes-long routine to make a single piece of gum that tastes like a five-course meal. (And as luck would have it, some poor soul looking for a copyright violation has posted it all on YouTube — here it is, courtesy of the generous Applebuster333. God, Gene Wilder’s bow tie gets me every time.) That’s essentially what’s going on with this project, though. A high-quality product, even if it’s slim enough to slide under the door, requires an untold amount of production and processing time before it jumps from the big screen onto your screen. Makes you want to treat that copy of John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth movie you fed to the neighbor’s dog with a little more respect. (Not really.)

Anyway, it’s been a night of startling technological revelations, especially when we go back to that first figure I mentioned about 900 pages ago. Let’s say there are 100 pages even in that Microsoft Word document I mentioned — as you’ll have completely forgotten by this point, it takes up 470 KB of space on my hard drive, which is just about all the data a Windows computer can handle anyway. (We’ll round it up to 500 KB, half a megabyte, for kicks.) I wrote for several hours every night for two months to get all that down.

What I’m trying to work my way around to is this: if you wrote at the same steady pace, a few hours a night, every night, it would take you more than 8000 years to achieve 25 gigabytes of text. 8333.33 years, to be exact — 8.3 millennia of constant typing. In that time, you would have written about 5 million pages, which actually doesn’t seem all that bad, considering it’s the average length of a typical American tax form. The United States would elect anywhere from one to two thousand new presidents. The sun would rise and set more than three million times. Mobile phones would have shrunk to molecular sizes. Radio pop would still be terrible, and so would airline food, although Delta will be flying to the Andromeda Galaxy by then. All jests aside, though, empires have risen and crumbled to dust in less time. Whole species have achieved dominance over the planet and then been snuffed out to make way for what’s coming next.

It’s a true sign of the times, I think, to consider things at this scale. We’ve come a long way from the typewriter, an even longer way from the Ticonderoga #2, which is still a writer’s most faithful friend in my eyes. But next time I stand in a computer store with my father and one of us says, “Man, we’ll never be able to use that much memory” (his words about our most recent purchase), I’ll know to think twice. The clock of human progress is a slow, quiet machine, but it will see us all into the dust before its steady march is done.