The Green Guide to transccoding

When it comes to digital goods, we tend to forget too easily that they have an ecological impact, as well as any physical good. Because we don’t really see that the bigger our digital files are, the bigger the storing devices have to be, that these devices need power to run, that the internet consumes a lot of electricity to connect us, and that all of this is made of materials which have a very big negative impact during the extractions. And these are just examples, one could write a near infinite list of what the digital world consumes and burns.

Here is a guide to help all of us keep in mind we can try to reduce our ecological impact, especially when working with media files and DuME. In future versions, DuME will help you improve your transcoding process and motion pictures production workflow to reduce your ecological impact.

What we need to take care of

Here is a short list of what we can work on to reduce our impact on the environment with our media files.

One media file may be small. We could even consider that all our media files are not so big after all, compared to all the data stored in the world. But let’s not forget video is the biggest part of the traffic on the internet, and even a very small decrease in the average video file size could save a lot both in storage and bandwidth.

A media file is meant to be played. And most of the time, the goal is for it to be played by as many people as possible. If the format is easier to decode, in terms of performance and bandwidth, that means less energy consumption to play it, and could save a lot of energy worldwide.

This is much less important compared to the two previous points, as it happens just a few times in the lifetime of a media file, but it consumes much more power than decoding, so whenever possible, it would be good to reduce encoding times and consumption. One of the easiest way is to be able to re-render only part of the video when making changes.

The needs for editing a media file, streaming it or screening it are different. When choosing the best format and adjusting decoding performance, we have to take the target and use into account.

Note

Of course, the following recommendations are just guidelines. You may need to improve quality depending on your specific needs during the production; the goal of this document is to show you which parameter you could tweak to try to reduce your impact on the environment.

Intermediary formats

Intermediary Media files, which will be used during the production process between each step and software, need to keep a good quality and as much data as possible, so it will not be easy to reduce the file size a lot. That being said, we have to ask ourselves if we really need that lossless encoding or if a small theoretical loss could be acceptable, considering that even at some significant compression levels the human eye may still be incapable of seeing any difference. Of course the real question is if you’ll still have enough data to edit the image afterwards, so that depends on your pipeline and what you need to do in the next step, but keep in mind you may not really need that full quality 32bpc lossless huge file.

Internet and streaming

Television or HDR screens

Cinema

Formats to avoid

Last step: edit/color grading

When reaching the last step, which should be edit and maybe color grading, you won’t need as much data as previous steps, and can use formats closer to the final delivery, but you still need a good decoding performance when scrolling in your timeline.

Internet and streaming

Television or HDR screens

Cinema

Formats to avoid

Final delivery

The final media file can be as small as possible and it’s not a problem to use imperceptible lossy compression. You don’t need it anymore to be performant when scrolling in time, as most of the time it will just be played at its intended speed, so you don’t need the format to be Intra-frame anymore (i.e. Prores and DnxHD/HR are not meant to be used as a final delivery).

Internet and streaming

Television or HDR screens

Cinema

Formats to avoid