What is DV & Firewire?

DV stands for “Digital Video”.  Digital Video is a format of video.

Digital Video is compressed inside camera, on the tape itself using its own built in DV codec.

Firewire, is the name of the port and protocol (cable) used to transfer digital video to your computer.  Technically firewire is the high speed, short distance data transfer protocol IEEE1394.  Some companies decided IEEE1394 was too much to remember so they simply renamed it Firewire. Sony call it iLink.  It’s all the same thing.

What is a DV Codec?

The word codec comes from the terms to COmpress or DECompress.

Quite simply, a Codec is a Program or Device that is able to encode a signal depending on its use.  You could use a codec to compress digital video for live broadcast.  This information would then be sent via satalite.  Or perhaps from home you could compress your video into a smaller file for use on the internet, using codecs built in to your encoding software. 

What does FPS mean?

FPS stands for Frames Per Second.  This is the term used to describe the frequency rate of images flashed or scanned per second.

If you imagine one of those old flick books, where you would draw a picture, and then turn the page over and draw the same picture but this time slightly different.  If you repeated this process about 25/50 times, when you flicker the pages through your fingers you’ve created a little animation!  Each 1 of these pictures would represent 1 frame in FPS.

What does HD mean?

HD stands for High Definition.  In a nutshell, HD offers up to four times more detail than DVD or digital TV broadcasts (Standard Definition).  This means sharper pictures and a larger projection therefore an enhanced viewing experience.

There are many different “flavours” of HD.   Most common flavours are:  HDV, HDCAM, DVCpro HD and XDCAM HD (EX). 

HDV (High Definition Video) is the most friendly flavour for beginners, and you can work with HDV on very small budgets.  We will mostly be covering HDV camera’s through-out Edit Crunch.

Take a look at our review on the Canon HV20 - a great introduction to filming in HDV.

 Here’s a frame size chart to for reference.

What does the I and P stand for in 1080i /1080p

I stands for Interlaced. P stands for progressive.

An Interlaced frame of video is broken up into two halves, often known as Odd or Even. Or Upper & Lower.

A Progressive frame is a full frame just like in our flick book example above. Video footage that is progressively scanned gives us the Cine Film look that is highly desired these days.

When editing your films, it’s vital that you know whether you’re working with Interlaced or Progressive material.  Especially when you are mixing the two types of video, it’s important that you know the basics in order to get decent results.

You can tell when video isn’t correctly processed if you pause the video, particularly on a frame with a high amount of motion in it, you will see jagged edges, or horizontal lines on the edges of objects.  This is a result of incorrectly exporting the video, using the wrong field domminance order.   Please visit the forum to discuss further.

What is Blu-Ray?

Blu-Ray is the name given to the new optical Disc format that uses a blue laser to store larger amounts of data onto DVD’s.

Until Blu-ray came along we would normally store data on DVD’s using a red laser.

The red laser has a larger wavelength, giving a maximum store capacity of 4.7Gigabytes of Data on a single layer disc. Blu-Ray (the blue laser) has a shorter wavelength allowing greater precision to squeeze more storage onto one disc. Blu-ray can now store up to 25Gigabytes on a single layer DVD!

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