ABSTRACT
The plan of attack in this chapter is as follows: an overview of video fundamentals including signal formats, resolutions, AV interfaces, signal processing, compression methods, and time code basics.
Despite the trend for all things digital, we live in an analog world. In 1876, Bell invented his “electrical speech machine” as he called it-the telephone-a great example of analog design. However, analog signals are susceptible to noise, not easily processed, not networkable, suffer loss during transmission, and are difficult to store. Digital representations of
analog signals generally overcome these negatives. Sure, digital has its trade-offs, but in the balance it wins out for many applications. Figure 11.1 shows the classic transform from the analog domain to the digital. Transformation is performed by an A-to-D converter that outputs a digital value every sample period at rate Fs. Better yet, some digital video and audio signals are never in analog form but are natively created with software or hardware. Often, but not always, the digital signal is converted back to analog using a D-to-A operator.
