Imagine If That Beautiful Scene Just...Stopped

Posted by B. Smith on Thursday, June 26, 2008 - 01:16 am:

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Imagine yourself running in slow motion through a field of bright yellow flowers, stretching from horizon to horizon under a deep blue sky, toward the one you love, the one you have wanted forever. When you’re about three feet from that person, suddenly the whole scene freezes up. There’s a couple jerks, you’re yanked closer, then back again, then suddenly you’re almost in the person’s arms but frozen in time again.

Arrgh! What a way to ruin a perfect moment! And while it may not happen that way in real life, we do live vicariously through filmed scenes like that, whether in feature films or in short films or even music videos. It’s a real drag when you’re watching a particularly great sequence, your emotions are tied up into it, and it goes into jerks like the one above. This can happen in a business, too. You’ve worked many overtime hours to create a video presentation for a client; it gets to the money shot, the one that’s really going to make the point, and the pitch is completely ruined by video that suddenly halts or jerks.

When a video is stored on—and played back from—a hard drive (very common these days given today’s huge disk capacities), a basic problem that will affect playback as above is file fragmentation. If fragmentation is not consistently addressed on a hard drive so that files are not split up into hundreds or thousands of pieces, each fragment must be accessed in order for a video to be played back. Fragmentation greatly slows down the frame rate (the speed at which playback occurs) and causes jerks and stops.

The question then becomes, how can fragmentation be permanently prevented so that playback is never an issue? The traditional method of defragmentation—scheduled defragmentation—won’t do this. In between scheduled runs fragmentation continues to build and affect performance. And with today’s large drives (such as those on which videos can be stored) defragmentation may not be occurring at all. Those beautiful scenes are still going to be ruined.

The only way to guarantee that video playback won’t be interrupted is with a completely automatic defragmentation solution, one that defragments with otherwise-idle resources whenever and wherever possible. No scheduling is ever required, and there is never a negative performance impact from the defragmentation process.

With such a solution in place, those wonderful video sequences, whether being viewed for personal entertainment or for closing a million-dollar account, will always play through and deliver the maximum impact.