Why is video bigger than the sum of its frames

Question

I tried making a video out of 1000 PNG files with total size 25.3MB. When I used the commands I found for lossless video-encoding like avconv -i Images%04d.png -c:v huffyuv output.avi my videos turned out to have 630MB. How is that possible, and how can I avoid that?

Answer 1

huffyuv is a very inefficient compression. It applys no temporal or spacial compression at all. It simply just zips up each frame. PNG uses compression specifically tuned for images. You can use a something like lossless AVC. It will still be fairly large (maybe even still larger that the sum of its parts) but it will be MUCH smaller than 630MB.