Digital Video Explained

Confused about [tag-tec]digital video[/tag-tec] and not sure how it affects you and your video files. Then read on to learn about digital video and how it compares with analog video.

We experience the world as an analog world. What ever we view or listen to, a beautiful gardens, a motor car race or a pop concert, we receive a steady stream of infinitely variable data through our senses. Be it light, sound, smell or touch it is ‘data’ that we are receiving.

Computers on the other hand can’t comprehend the analog world that we live in, they only understand ones and zeros. Despite this computers can show pictures, play music and display moving videos. All these variable colors, sounds, movements and shapes are converted into the ones and zeros language of computers. This conversion process is known as digitizing and digital video] (DV) is video that has been digitized.

To help you understand the difference between analog data and digital data imagine a chart of some data. Analog can be compared to a line chart as analog values are infinately variable and digital can be compared to a bar chart as digital values are made up of specifically defined individual bits of data.

Digital recordings are in theory inferior to analog recordings because the latter can contain more information. But with modern technology this is not so apparent as the individual bits of information are packed so close together that we humans can not tell the difference. In fact to most people digital recordings seem to be of a higher quality than the analogue, how can this be.

The problem with analog recordings are that they are susceptible to deterioration. Each and every time that data is copied some of the original infinately variable data is lost. This ‘generational losss’ is the downside of analog recordings. Digital data does not have this problem. No matter how many time the data is copied a one is always a one and a zero is always a zero. Even playing analog recordings causes deterioration of the material, your 60s LP records do not sound the same now as they used to, the crispness has gone and the hiss has increased. Worse still with the movie made of family weddings from twenty years ago. Digital recordings are based on instructions that tell the computer how to create the data, so the computer creates the data the same way every time, year after year.

Compared to a few years, before digital video was available, working with and editing digital data is so easy and is a real blessing. You can copy, edit, re-edit and copy again as much as you like confident that the quality of your data will not diminish.