ONE in Software

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As the detail of electronic imagery and the need to manipulate it in real-time increase, so do demands on storage capacity In Kodak s Cineon electronic film system, a single 35 mm film frame is given approximately 3,000 4,000 picture elements of resolution, or 12 million points Each of those points is assigned values of red, green, and blue components, and those values might be chosen from a range of perhaps 4,000 possibilities, or 12 bits worth Thus, a single 35 mm film frame could generate 3,000 4,000 3 12, or 432,000,000 bits, not counting any error correction or other coding At this point, absolute numbers become unwieldy, so it becomes appropriate to use mathematical prefixes The same number of bits may be expressed as 432 megabits (Mb) or 54 megabytes (MB) (It is worth noting that, while standard mathematical prefixes increase by factors of 1,000, in the computer industry prefixes sometimes increase by factors of 1,024 For the special case of the first such factor, the distinction is normally noted by case as follows: 1 kB is 1,000 bytes; 1 KB is 1,024 bytes In this section of the book, for convenience, factors of 1,000 will be used) That 54 MB, however, represents only a single frame There are calls for moving imagery to have no less than 72 frames per second That s 3,888 MB per second, allowing the next prefix to be invoked: 3888 gigabytes per second or roughly 4 GB/s There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, which means 14,400 GB of storage for this hypothetical uncompressed high-resolution imagery The next prefix makes that 144 terabytes (TB) A typical, uncompressed movie could easily fit on three 10 TB disk drives (whenever such drives are introduced) A week has 168 hours That would require 2,4192 TB of storage Moving to the next prefix changes that to a mere 24 petabytes (PB) There are 52 weeks in a year, and pro-

gramming services like DirecTV may offer some 200 channels That would be 24,960 PB of high-resolution programming for DirecTV in one year Moving to the next prefix makes that a manageable 2496 exabytes (thus the name of that storage equipment manufacturer) or roughly 25 EB DirecTV, however, is only one programmer Suppose a thousand programmers decide to offer the same amount of programming That would be 25,000 EB or just 25 zettabytes (ZB) And, if surround video someday requires a thousand times more information, there still won t be any problem One more official metric system (SI) prefix allows those 25,000 ZB to be expressed as just 25 yottabytes (YB) It s easy to be lulled into a sense of simplicity by the use of these prefixes, but 25 YB is, in reality, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits And if those programmers decided to store ten years of material instead of just one The official prefixes run out after 24 zeroes (septillions in American terminology, quadrillions in British), though they also cover quantities smaller than one A millihelen, for example, would be a thousandth of a Helen, or the amount of beauty, according to Greek mythology, necessary to launch a single ship Micro- is the prefix for millionth, nano- for billionth, pico- for trillionth, femto- for quadrillionth, atto- for quintillionth, zepto- for sextillionth, and yacto- for septillionth The last few, no doubt, inspired one person to suggest that the next prefixes be harpo- (for octillionth) and groucho- (for nonillionth) In the other direction, harpi- would connote octillions and grouchi- nonillions Many in the digital storage industry have already adopted these new prefixes, although metric officials have not yet leapt at the chance Thus, there is absolutely no need to worry about storage capacity A single one grouchibyte memory will easily handle all of the world s videographic needs until long after we re all dead