ABSTRACT
Digital technology has brought amazing advances to field of compositing but has also brought some new problems that didn’t exist in analog world. Standard definition video in 8 bits creates a raw data stream that is over 30 megabytes per second (MB/sec). For standard definition using ITUR 601 video in format such as Digital BetaCam, there are several stages of compression, or data reduction. In ITUR 601 video, for instance, the color sampling will be reduced to half its original data. In 601 SD video such as Digital BetaCam, a 4:2:2 color decimation system is used. This means that across each video scan line, every pixel is sampled for luminance (that’s the “4”) but only every other pixel is sampled for color (that’s the first “2”). The second “2” indicates that the same color sampling patterns are used in the next video line; in other words, every other pixel will be sampled for color in the next line as well.
