Each video frame was a 50MB uncompressed TGA file, 30 times a second.
Ouch! Not even a PNG?
Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015
by burntwater on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:48PM
(#10780306)
Uncompressed TGA is used for two reasons: Quality (this particular image was going on a screen three stories tall) and, as the other commenter mentioned, the time required to decompress images.
I'm not an expert on the exact architecture, but I'm guessing that with uncompressed TGA you just throw the bits at the GPU and they get displayed, while if you have to uncompress images that first gets handled by the CPU (?).
My recent project, which was relatively small, played back a single video over 4 blended projectors. Each video frame was a 50MB uncompressed TGA file, 30 times a second. On a more complex show, you could be trying to play back multiple video streams simultaneously.
D3 - http://www.d3technologies.com/ and Pandora - http://www.coolux.de/products/pandoras-box-server/
are two of the big players in the industry.