This may be a stupid question, but it's something I've noticed and I'm curious. Sometimes a DVD's movie file will take up the whole disc -- I watched a film last night that clocked in at 7.6 GB for a 2-hour film, and yet the image was interlaced and fairly soft, without an aggressive soundtrack that I'd think would take up too much space. Sometimes I watch movies that are less than half that file size that look and sound quite sharp. Why is this? I would think that higher image quality would correlate with a larger file size, but apparently the two are not necessarily related.
This has been something I've thought about myself, Mastage. But I'm not an engineer, so I'm as bemused as are you. Sometimes a frame rendered as 4:3 will use gigabytes more than a movie rendered in letterbox format. Does the latter use less space due to the frame being cropped? It's crazy because the older 'square' TV format seems to use a lot more information as a result. The issue of image compression is not at all clear to me. I'm still using 4:3 monitors for all the computers at my disposal. I do have a widescreen monitor at home, however, it's in mothballs. I'd assume if you want to see a film on one of these wider-than-higher devices then BR is best of all. Seeing demos of movies in department stores on modern day television screens makes me think back to when I'd see a movie like Fahrenheit 451, where futuristic flat-screens were depicted in sci-fi movies. Let me pinch myself.
