ABSTRACT

Traditional HD cameras have many adjustments that could be made to the image either with switches, selection wheels and dials, or in menus—“the knobs.” Changes could be made to gamma (also known as the midtones or mid-range), color, the highlights (knee), shadows (toe), and other aspects of the image. Many cameras still allow the cinematographers to make changes in the color matrix, the gamma, and other important image characteristics, but the big difference is that these manipulations are not actually recorded as part of the video signal—instead they are (in most cases) only saved as metadata, essentially this metadata is a sort of commentary on the video scenes. Pixel binning is a process used to combine the charge collected by several adjacent Charge Coupled Device (CCD) pixels, and is designed to reduce noise and improve signal-to-noise ratio and frame rate of digital cameras.