Like, I feel like, books, its just a bunch of description that never truely paint a scene.
In a movie or TV show, you see exactly what the scene is, exactly what is happening. I mean, of course, sometime they cut corners and cut of parts of a book, but otherwise, its more easily conveyed.
Like the popular saying, a picture is worth a thousands words. But I’d say: a video is worth a million pictures.
Not universally, no.
People absorb different things in different ways.
Where filmed media excels is cutting the description into pieces and showing it on screen. That doesn’t necessarily make it easier to understand for everyone, and certainly not for every book that get turned into a show or movie.
For folks that have issues with picturing things in their head (aphantasia or disphantasia), movies are going to be a major boost in understanding. For folks that don’t have that issue, it comes down more to preference.
I can’t say either is better, or even easier to understand, in and of itself. I actually run towards hyperphantasia; I can read a book and once I sink in, it’s as vivid as it gets. Sometimes, it’s a movie in my head and the words on the page are just there in the background (and that’s despite dyslexia, if only a fairly minor expression of it).
There’s book versions of movies as well, with the most interesting example being the E.T. novelization from way back when. The book changed things that were in the movie, to the extent that it was very noticeable. But both the movie and book had their own merits in terms of understanding the story. One example is the scenes with the plastic barriers and such while ET is being examined by the government. A deeper sense of dread and horror was possible in the book via descriptions. But the movie conveyed the claustrophobic, invasive feeling of it better because you could see all the alienness of what the government was doing, how all the lights and airlocks and such became more apart from the family than the family was from ET.
But, if the author fucks up the descriptions, no picture in the mind will come close to what film can do. So there’s a lot more craft needed in writing visuals than there are in most video footage. The barrier between understandable images on screen and conveying information is lower. Conversely, film has to work harder to convey emotion via craft; you can just say that a character is scared in a book and get the basic idea down.
So it isn’t cut and dried. There’s a lot of factors between the mind of the creator/ and the audience’s minds that make it complicated