Editing Motion compensation (section)

== Illustrated example ==
The following is a simplistic illustrated explanation of how motion compensation works. Two successive frames were captured from the movie ''[[Elephants Dream]]''. As can be seen from the images, the bottom (motion compensated) difference between two frames contains significantly less detail than the prior images, and thus compresses much better than the rest. Thus the information that is required to encode compensated frame will be much smaller than with the difference frame. This also means that it is also possible to encode the information using difference image at a cost of less compression efficiency but by saving coding complexity without motion compensated coding; as a matter of fact that motion compensated coding (together with [[motion estimation]], motion compensation) occupies more than 90% of encoding complexity.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Type
! Example Frame
! Description
|-
| Original
| [[File:Motion compensation example-original.jpg|160px]]
| Full original frame, as shown on screen.
|-
| Difference
| [[File:Motion compensation example-difference.jpg|160px]]
| Differences between the original frame and the next frame.
|-
| Motion compensated difference
| [[File:Motion compensation example-compensated difference.jpg|160px]]
| Differences between the original frame and the next frame, shifted right by 2 pixels. Shifting the frame ''compensates'' for the [[panning (camera)|panning]] of the camera, thus there is greater overlap between the two frames.
|}