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The advent of digital video has taken a medium which was once only accessible to people with a lot of money and access to large and expensive editing studios and given it to the masses. You can be the director, your bedroom your editing suite and your family and friends can be the “stars.” Any one person is now capable of shooting and editing broadcast quality footage and displaying it for the world to see via the internet. The cost of a camcorder is now the cost of making a movie as distribution costs are now next to nothing due to digital processing. It is the shift in the price of editing software which is the main reason behind digital videos’ mass appeal. A camcorder may be out of some peoples price range but anyone with a camera phone can now edit their footage and export it sometimes even on the one piece of hardware.
The pick-up device in a video camera reads a visual image and creates variations in electrical signals that correspond to changes in brightness and colour in the image, thus sending a description of the image to be processed by a television. The process is reversed in the television. It receives the electrical signals and displays the corresponding brightness and colours. The camera scans the surface of the pick-up starting from the uppermost left to the bottom right, similar to the way we read books. This pattern is called the raster. When it has finished its scan, information called a sync pulse is added to the signal. It then goes back to the top left and begins the scan again.
Digital video is fast proving to be the successor to film for many different reasons. Digitized images are better quality with a higher resolution in both imaging and sound than analog images stored on magnetic videotape. Digital video generates more robust signals with less vulnerability to such problems as static, interference and noise. The digital signal works differently to the analog signal as it assigns each pixel measured a numerical value, then orders these in binary code. Eastman Kodak have announced a CCD chip capable of holding 16,777,216 bytes per square inch which is double the resolution of 35mm film. The picture resolution of digital is double that of analog (500 - 250 interlaced lines).
These are the current media available for storage:
According to a study carried out by the British Film Institute for Becta, the British governments computing agency, teachers believe that digital video has been proven to enhance students skills at problem solving, risk taking, negotiating and reasoning. It has enabled opportunities for collaboration between schools on a global scale. Here is a quote by Ed Nassour, senior vice president of 20th Century Fox Television: “Ultimately digital image acquisition will definitely replace film for TV production. You don’t need a crystal ball to know that”