BCS Coventry Meeting

I recently attended an event at the Warwick Uni Digital Lab on HDR.
HDR = High Dynamic Range
HDR is basically (and this description is basic as I am not a authority on the subject) pictures and video that operate in the same range as the human eye sees, this means that images are a lot sharper and that we see on screen exactly what we would see in the outside world. Traditional Images are captured in LDR or low dynamic range and as a result can be destroyed by glare from the Sun or be overwhelmed by other light sources.

So, whats this got to do with Green IT?

Well, quite a lot actually, the new HDR camera captures 24MBytes of data PER frame or 42GBytes for a minute of video footage compared to 9GBytes for a minute of normal footage.
As you can imagine this means that the new HDR cameras are capturing huge amounts of Data, data that will need to be stored either on board the camera (not technically possible at the moment) or on a separate storage device (the prototype had a flight case with 54TBytes onboard with a massive cable connecting the storage to the camera) and eventually in Data Centres.
Yep, the Data Centres that are already under strain due to increased data storage requirements placing high demand on energy.
The techies on the project are working on new compression techniques to reduce this heavy data capture so hopefully before HDR becomes a widespread means of image capture, the amount of data transmitted and stored can be seriously reduced.
Further information on HDR and the work that Warwick University Digital Lab are conducting can be found on these links
www.gohdr.com
www.wmg.warwick.ac.uk
www2.warwick.ac.uk