The Digital Fact Book - Quantel

Byte (B), kilobyte (kB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB), terabyte(TB) and petabyte (PB)1 Byte (B) = 8 bits (b) which can describe 256 discrete values (brightness, color, etc.).Traditionally, just as computer-folk like to start counting from zero, they also ascribe 2 raisedto the power 10, 20, 30, etc. (2 10 , 2 20 , 2 30 , etc.) to the values kilo, mega, giga, etc. whichbecome, 1,024, 1,048,576, 1,073,741,824, etc. This can be difficult to handle for thosedrilled only in base-10 mathematics. Fortunately, disk drive manufacturers, who have todeal in increasingly vast numbers, describe their storage capacity in powers of 10, so a100 GB drive has 100,000,000,000 bytes capacity. Observation suggests both systemsare continuing in use... which could lead to some confusion.BTraditional New Approx duration@601 @709 2k1080/60i1 kB = 2 10 bytes = 1,024 B 10 3 B 2 / 3 line 1/ 5 line 1/ 8 line1 MB = 2 20 bytes = 1,048,576 B 10 6 B 1 frame 1/5 frame 130 lines1 GB = 2 30 bytes = 1.074 x 10 9 B 10 9 B 47 sec 6.4 sec 3.5 sec1 TB = 2 40 bytes = 1.099 x 10 12 B 10 12 B 13 1 / 4 hrs 1 3 / 4 hrs 58 mins1 PB = 2 50 bytes = 1.126 x 10 15 B 10 15 B 550 days 74 days 40 daysCurrently 3.5-inch hard disk drives store from about 70 GB to 1 TB. Solid-state store chips,RAMs, increment fourfold in capacity every generation now offering up to 8Gb chips(i.e. 8 x 2 30 ). Flash memory is now used in some camcorders such as Panasonic’s P2 series.A full frame of standard definition digital television, sampled at 10 bits according to ITU-RBT.601, requires around 1 MB of storage (1.037 MB for 576-line, 876 kB for 480-line systems).HDTV frames comprise up to 5 or 6 times more data, and 2K digital film frames sampledin RGB or X´Y´Z´(DCI colorspace) are about 12 MB.See also: DCI, DRAM, Disk drives, Storage35