Why do animations demand so much storage space and how can you overcome this?

Answer 1

Animations can take up larger amounts of storage space due to the requirement of number of "frames per second" or FPS. For film your are looking at 24 or more frames per second to maintain the illusion of movement, or persistence of vision. Depending on format you could go as high as 60 frames per second. So initially each frame, however large they are is effectively going to be repeated with variations at least 24 times a second. To reduce storage compression such as the MPEG standard can at regular intervals find Key Frames and between each key frame only store the delta, or difference, from the most recent key frame. Depending on scene the compression can be substantial. Along with image compression (per frame, rather then just the delta technique) can drastically reduce the storage requirement. Normally though, the film, animation, scene is first rendered raw, without any compression (hence massive storage) then ran through compression at a later time rather then at run time. This is done to allow fine tuning of the master and have variable options for the output. e.g. The Master File(s) can be compressed in serveral different formats for NTSC, PAL, DVD, Blueray, IMAX, Online, etc. Keeping the Master file uncompressed allows it to be compressed later on for different requirements.