15. Can the DVD format display high-quality computer animation ?

Computer animation consists of images with sudden changes in contrast and brightness not normally seen in the real world. Hand-drawn animation sequences in cartoons can contain many sharp edges which may not get compressed well or at all. The MPEG-2 compression methods employed by DVD-Video breaks the image of each video frame into smaller square blocks, and converts the pixel color intensities of each block into frequency components (by a process known as discrete cosine transform, or DCT). Sudden changes in contrast and brightness or sharp edges often convert into high frequency components. Since MPEG-2 compression discards high frequency components if they are above certain thresholds defined by the quality level setting, this often results in severe loss of color information and is a tough problem at lower data bit rate.

However, at higher data encoding bit rate (6 megabits or above), commonly used for DVD, this problem does not usually occur. On the contrary, many successful commercial animations such as "Toy Story", "It's a bug life" from Pixar, work well with MPEG-2 compression. The main movie title of these motion pictures takes less than 4 gigabytes of storage even at fairly high data bit rate.