My early
moviemaking career was stunted by the practical considerations of lugging
around a fragile, expensive camera and the huge VCR to which it was attached.
Twenty-five years later, though, the time is right to work with video-the tools
and technologies available to amateurs today would seem magical if we could
teleport them back to the disco era.
Video technology is crucial to many home and office computer
users. Regardless of whether you're sending Grandma digital video of a child's
birthday party, setting up a home security system, or preparing a video
presentation for business purposes, your decisions about equipment, technology,
and software are important to the final product's quality. Before you dive into video, you need to understand some
ba
sics about the medium. I provide enough information to get you started; in
future columns, I'll cover techniques for taking better videos, review
equipment and software for making and editing digital video, and discuss the
technical details of various gear.
Analog vs. Digital
In the past, video recording was an exclusively analog
process; recorders placed video signals on a magnetic wire or tape by varying
the amount of voltage that passed through a recording head. Analog is
infinitely variable because you can change the voltage or frequency of the
signal sent to the head to change the signals on the tape. VHS and Betamax
formats are both analog.
Although analog technology has existed since 1956, the
signal quality isn't great. While a broadcast NTSC signal might have about 330
lines of resolution (resolution is the number of horizontal lines that make up
an image), a VHS recording of that same signal will produce only about 240
lines of resolution. (For more information about resolution, visit
The difference in resolution
explains why VHS recordings tend to look muddy and washed out compared with
broadcast signals. In comparison, DVDs output 540 lines of resolution, although
not all TVs can display that many lines. Resolution is why on most TVs, DVD
images are sharper and more colorful than the same images recorded on videotape.
Betamax, Beta SP, and Super VHS (SVHS) formats use more
bandwidth to record signals. More recorded bandwidth means a higher-fidelity
signal. For example, SVHS has about 400 lines of resolution, a great
improvement over VHS. However, these formats still use analog recording, which
means you can't do much with them except record and play back.
In the mid-1980s, digital editing systems appeared; these
systems use a frame buffer to capture individual frames or a frame sequence
from an analog tape, then digitize the image so that you can edit it. After you
edit the image, you can send it to an analog tape. At first, only television
networks used digital editing products, but as digital technology improved,
prices dropped and these systems became more widespread. Recording a video
image in digital format lets you superimpose logos or text, and adding special
effects is easy because you don't need to perform the special effects in
realtime (i.e., while the video's actually playing); it's OK to take longer than
1 second to add effects to a 1-second video clip.
Digital images let editors randomly jump to any point in a
video stream without rewinding or fast-forwarding a tape. One of digital's
biggest advantages is that images don't lose their quality when you copy them.
This advantage is crucial for editing and production companies, but it's
important to home users as well.
Types of Digital Technology
As digital technology became less expensive and more
versatile, electronics manufacturers developed standards for digital video
recording. The first standard on the market was JVC's Digital VHS. DVHS offered
more than 500 lines of resolution on what looked like a standard VHS tape;
however, DVHS never caught on because VHS and SVHS were too entrenched in the
home market.
Concurrently, a group of manufacturers developed the Digital
Video (DV) standard, which uses digital recording to encode compressed video as
a sequence of 720 x 480 frames. Several tape formats use the DV video-encoding
scheme; Mini DV is the most popular. Mini DV tapes are slightly larger than two
matchboxes stuck together; because the Mini DV tapes are so small, so are the
cameras.
Sony, which already had a substantial investment in analog
8mm camcorder technology, also introduced a hybrid format, Digital8. D8 uses
standard, widely available 8mm tapes, but it records in the DV format. D8
camcorders also can play back analog 8mm tapes, which is useful if you want to
capture and edit existing analog video.
Recording Pictures
The digital camcorder element that actually captures an
image is a Charge Coupled Device (CCD). Incoming photons strike cells (i.e.,
pixels) in the CCD, creating an electrical impulse that the camera records. The
CCD's native resolution improves as the number of cells increases. CCD
capability is often rated by CCD size, so a 0.5" CCD might have four times
as many cells as a 0.25" CCD. The number of scan lines on the CCD is a
better measure of picture quality. Most consumer camcorders capture colors by
using sequential scanning of the CCD, once for each primary color (red, green,
and blue). More sophisticated, and more expensive, units use three separate CCD
elements, one for each primary color.
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