Digital video is a representation of moving visual images in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images with analog signals.

The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.

History

Starting in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, several types of video production equipment that were digital in their internal workings were introduced, such as time base correctors (TBC) and digital video effects (DVE) units (one of the former being the Thomson-CSF 9100 Digital Video Processor, an internally all-digital full-frame TBC introduced in 1980, and two of the latter being the Ampex ADO, and the Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC) DVE). They operated by taking a standard analog composite video input and digitizing it internally. This made it easier to either correct or enhance the video signal, as in the case of a TBC, or to manipulate and add effects to the video, in the case of a DVE unit. The digitized and processed video information that was output from these units would then be converted back to standard analog video.

Digital video may refer to:

DV is a format for storing digital video. It was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camera recorders.

The original DV specification, known as Blue Book, was standardized within the IEC 61834 family of standards. These standards define common features such as physical videocassettes, recording modulation method, magnetization, and basic system data in part 1. Part 2 describes the specifics of 525-60 and 625-50 systems. The IEC standards are copyrighted publications available for purchase from IEC or ANSI.

In 2005, DV was superseded by the successor format HDV, which used the same tape format with a different video codec. Some cameras at the time had the ability to switch between DV and HDV recording modes.

DV compression

DV uses lossy compression of video while audio is stored uncompressed. An intraframe video compression scheme is used to compress video on a frame-by-frame basis with the discrete cosine transform (DCT).

Closely following ITU-R Rec. 601 standard, DV video employs interlaced scanning with the luminance sampling frequency of 13.5 MHz. This results in 480 scanlines per complete frame for the 60 Hz system, and 576 scanlines per complete frame for the 50 Hz system. In both systems the active area contains 720 pixels per scanline, with 704 pixels used for content and 16 pixels on the sides left for digital blanking. The same frame size is used for 4:3 and 16:9 frame aspect ratios, resulting in different pixel aspect ratios for fullscreen and widescreen video.