Introduction to Digital Video

Significance of the topic

With the increasing accessibility of technology for everyday people, things are starting to

get digitalized: digital camera, digital cable, digital sound, and digital video. It is no

longer the case where a video production is only possible for specialized studios. The

availability of various user-friendly, inexpensive tools is pushing motion pictures into

individual computer owners.

Discussion

What is digital video?

Digital video refers to the capturing, manipulation, and storage of moving images that

can be displaced on computer screens (The Lycos Tech Glossary, 1999). This requires

that the moving images be digitally handled by the computer. The word digital refers to a

system based on discontinuous events, as opposed to analog, a continuous event.

Computers are digital systems; they do not process images the way the human eye does.

So how does it work?

Before the Digital Era, to display analog video images on a computer monitor, the video

signal had to first be converted from analog to digital form. A special video digitalizing

overlay board or hardware on the motherboard had to be installed in your computer to

take the video signal and convert it to digital information (Vaughan, 1998). To do this,

however, required a very powerful computer to be able to read and digitalize every frame

repetitively. So the next step in digital video evolution was to eliminate the analog

videotape. Thus, the entire procedure, including the capturing of video, is in digital form.
First, a camera and a microphone capture the picture and sounds of a video session and

send analog signals to a video-capture adapter board. The board only captures half of the

number of frames per second that movies use in order to reduce the amount of data to be

processed. Second, there is an analog-to-digital converter chip on the video-capture

adapter card, and it converts the analog signals (waves) to digital patterns (0s and 1s).

Third, a compression/decompression chip or software reduces the data to a minimum

necessary for recreating the video signals (White, 1999). In this procedure, no analog was

involved, making the process more efficient.

Advantages

What is it about digital video that makes it so attractive? Isn’t videotape good enough?

Here are three of many reasons that explain why digital videos are becoming more

popular than ever.

Ease of manipulation . The difference between analog and digital is like comparing a

typewriter with a word processor. Just like the cut and paste function is much easier and

faster with a word processor, editing is easier and faster with a digital video. Also, many

effects that were exclusive for specialized post production houses are now easily

achieved by bringing in files from Photoshop, Flash, and Sound Edit as components in a

video mix (Seecharan, 1999). In addition, the ability to separate sound from image

enables editing one without affecting the other.

Preservation of data . It is not true that DV is better simply because it is digital. Big

screen films are not digital and are still highly esteemed as quality images. However, it is

easier to maintain the quality of a digital video. Traditional tapes are subject to wear and

tear more so than DVD or hard drive disks. Also, once done, a digital video can be copied

over and over without losing its original information. Analog signals can be easily

distorted and will lose much of the original data after a few transfers.
Internet. A digital video can be sent via the Internet to countless end users without

having to make a copy for every viewer. It is easy to store, retrieve, and publish.

Compression

Digital video files can be very large. For example, one single frame from a television

image with a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and a color depth of 16 bits has a size of 1.35

MB (Fisher & Schroeder, 1999). Multiply that by 25 frame per second and then by the

duration of a movie! It is not practical—sometimes impossible—to have videos of this

size. Thus compression, the process of reducing file size by eliminating unnecessary data

for reconstruction purposes, is a must.

There are two types of compression, “lossless” and “lossy”. The lossless compression

retains the original data so that the individual image sequences remain the same. It saves

space by removing image areas that use the same color. The compression rate is usually

no better than 3:1 (Fisher & Schroeder.). The low rate makes most lossless compression

less desirable. The “lossy” compression methods remove image and sound information

that is unlikely to be noticed by the viewer. Some information is lost, but since it is not

differentiated by the human perception, the quality perceived is still the same, while the

volume is dramatically decreased.

There are many compression formats. Here are the few most widely used.

MPEG(pronounced em-peg) stands for Moving Picture Experts Group. The term

is generally used to name the set of digital video compression standards and file formats

developed by this group. MPEG uses lossy compression, and achieves a high

compression rate by storing only the changes from one frame to another (the delta), and

not the entire frame. There are two major standards. MPEG-1 provides a 352 x 240

resolution at 30 frames per second. The product quality is a little below VCR videos.

The MPEG-2 provides a 720 x480 and 1280 x 720 resolutions at 60 frames per second,
with full CD-quality audio. It can compress a two hour video into a few gigabytes.

MPEG-2 is sufficient for all major TV standards and DVD-ROM (Fisher & Schroeder).

MPEG-4 is in development (there is no MPEG-3), and will provide multiple views and

multiple soundtracks of a scene, as well as stereoscopic and 3-D views (Vaughan, 1998).

AVIstands for Audio Video Interlaced. It is one of the oldest formats. It was

created by Microsoft to go with Windows 3.1 and it’s “Video for Windows” application.

Even though it is widely used due to the number of editing systems and software that use

AVI by default, this format has many restrictions, specially the compatibility with

operations systems and other interface boards (Fisher & Schroeder).

MOV format, created by Macintosh, is the proprietary format of the QuickTime

application. It can also run on PCs. Being able to store both video and sound

simultaneously, the format was once superior to AVI. The latest version of QuickTime

also has streaming capabilities for internet video. However, with the new MPEG-2

format, the MOV format started to lose its popularity (Fisher & Schroeder, 1999), until it

was decided that the MPEG-4 is to use the QuickTime format as the basis of its

standards.

Digital video via Internet

Due to the size of some large video files and the limited bandwidth, transmission of video

and audio data via the Internet is only possible using streaming technology. The current

big players in the streaming media business are Real Networks and Microsoft. But, it was

big communication companies such as CNN who fist offered this technology. Now Real

Network’s Real Audio and Real video streaming formats are the pseudo standards (Fisher

& Schroeder).
Integrating digital video into a Web Page

There are some pros and cons in putting a video on a web page. For one, it could be very

compelling and could really enhance the interest level of the site, thus attract people to

view the page. On the other hand, poorly designed video (or animation, for that matter),

can distract viewers. If your video is too large, it will take a long time to load, and the

viewer will grow impatient waiting on a blank screen and will move on to another web

site. A good rule of thumb is to not let video be the only way to access information.

Offer alternatives: preview clips with lower resolution and shorter duration, a still picture

with some captions, exported sound files, movies of smaller size windows (Waters,

1997). For example, if you have four videos on a page, by showing a still image of each

with a sentence or two describing the video you would allow the viewer to decide which

they wanted to take the time to watch and would not need to start streaming the ones in

which they are not interested.

Because of the limited bandwidth and the traffic load on the net, it is important to

compress a digital video file as much as feasible in order to deliver good quality video.

However, do not take a movie that’s already compressed for CD ROM and re-compress it

for the web. Compress the originally captured files with light or no compression and re-

edit and compress those, to ensure quality (Stern & Lettieri, 1998). Another tip is if the

video you plan to use on a page uses a smaller window than the original, reduce the

window before you compress it to get a smaller file. As far as color, if the compressor

lets you choose the number of colors, choose the greatest number. Lowering the number

of colors generally doesn’t lower your final file size enough, but you might lose the

quality of colors and lighting in the final product. Nevertheless, if you know that your

video uses 256 colors, there is no need to go beyond that (Stern & Lettieri).
To post the video on a web page, you need to make sure the server is configured for the

format you are using. For example, if you use a QuickTime movie, the server needs to

have a listing for QuickTime files in its configuration files. Many times this step is

automated, sometimes in default format and you need not worry about it. Then, to attach

the video by using HTML, include an EMBED tag in your code when and where you

want the video to appear:

<HTML
>
<BODY
>
<EMBED SRC= “my_video.mov” WIDTH=320
HEIGHT=256>
</BODY
>
</HTML
You> may be using web authoring tools that enable you to skip the codes and use other

mechanisms (icons, for example), to “attach” the video to your web design. This is only

the beginning of posting a video to a page. There are many other features—some of them

highly advanced—that can be added to a digital video online either through the HTML

codes or through the video production application program (Stern & Lettieri), which are

beyond the scope of this paper.

Summary

Digital video are becoming more popular and accessible through the various media

technology advances which enable users to capture, manipulate and store video data in

efficient and inexpensive ways. With the increasingly efficient compression formats and

easiness of integrating videos in web pages, more people are able to enjoy producing and

publishing movies in the digital world.

Reference and related web sites:

Fisher, B. and Schroeder, U. (1999). http://www7.tomshardware.com/video

Lyco Tech Glossary. (1999). http://webopedia.lycos.com/Multimedia/Video/video.html

Seecharan, S.L.H. (1999). http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/spring99/V22.0380-003/index.htm

Stern, J. & Lettieri, R. (1998). QuickTime and Movie Player Pro for Windows and

Macintoshes. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

Vaughan, T. (1998). Multimedia: Making it Work (4 th ed.). Berkeley, CA: McGraw-Hill.

Waters, C. (1997). Universal Web Design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing.

White, R. (1999). How Computers Work. Indianapolis, IN: QUE.

*This paper is written by Yu-Lu Hsiung for the course EDC385G Multimedia Authoring

at the University of Texas at Austin.