Specifications

primer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction
1 Video basics
12 Digital video formats and camcorders
16 Conguring your system
19 The creative process: an overview
of movie-making
21 Acquiring source material
24 Nonlinear editing
31 Correcting the color
33 Digital audio for video
36 Visual eects and motion graphics
42 Getting video out of your computer
44 Conclusion
44 How to purchase Adobe software products
44 For more information
50 Glossary
A Digital Video Primer:
An Introduction to DV Production,
Post-Production, and Delivery
Introduction
e world of digital video (DV) encompasses a large amount of technology. ere are
entire industries focused on the nuances of professional video, including cameras, storage,
and transmission. But you don’t need to feel intimidated. As DV technology has evolved,
it has become increasingly easier to produce high-quality work with a minimum of
underlying technical know-how.
is primer is for anyone getting started in DV production. e rst part of the primer
provides the basics of DV technology; and the second part, starting with the sec-
tion titled “e creative process,” shows you how DV technology and the applications
contained in Adobe® Production Studio, a member of the Adobe Creative Suite family,
come together to help you produce great video.
One of the rst things you should understand when talking about video or audio is the
dierence between analog and digital.
An analog signal is a continuously varying voltage that appears as a waveform when
plotted over time. Each vertical line in Figures 1a and 1b, for example, could represent
1/10,000 of a second. If the minimum voltage in the waveform is 0 and the maximum is
1, point A would be about .25 volts (Figure 1a).
A digital signal, on the other hand, is a numerical representation of an analog signal. A
digital signal is really a stream of bits (a long list of binary numbers). Each number in
the list is a snapshot, or sample, of the analog signal at a point in time (Figure 1b). e
sample rate of a digital stream is the number of snapshots per second. For example, if 0
volts is represented by the numerical value 0 and 1 volt by the value 256, point A would
be represented by the number 64, which in binary form is a string of ones and zeros like
this: 1000000
Digital has a number of advantages over analog. One of the most important is the very
high delity of the content. An analog device, like a cassette recorder or television set,
simply renders the variations in voltage as sound or pictures, and has no way of distin-
guishing between a voltage variation that comes from the original signal and one that
comes from electrical interference caused by a power line, for example (Figure 2a).
Electrical interference or noise can come from an external source or from the tape, or
components in a recorder or the television itself. When you duplicate a tape, noise
recorded on the original tape is added to the new tape. If you were to then duplicate the
new tape, noise from the two previous tapes would be added to the third tape and so on.
Each copy of the tape adds to the generation loss, or loss in delity, from the original.
Video basics