The era of digital video
In 1989, the Svema factory produced the last batch of amateur film in 8mm format. Five years ago the last laboratory for the development of this film was closed, and soon after, all the necessary chemicals disappeared from the sale … Thus, before our eyes, the era of home cinema ended and the era of amateur video began. . However, the latter, in turn, existed even fewer and, it seems, exactly the same fate awaits you: video is moving to digital formats.
So if you have a computer, buying an analog video camera and a board to digitize an analog signal (even a relatively cheap one, like MiroVideo DC20 / 30) seems at least a pointless waste of money today. The age of analog video is irrevocably a thing of the past, and we recommend that our magazine readers, before it’s too late, sell outdated analog hardware. Today, you can still get a third of the price for them, and if you’re lucky, even half …
Also, the same fate awaits television. For example, the state standard for high-definition color television (1,125 lines per frame), adopted in the United States in late 1996, has been successfully introduced into regular television broadcasting for the past three years. Inexpensive set-top boxes were launched for existing 525-line analog color televisions, and a decision was made in 2006 to stop broadcasting in analog format entirely.
All these innovations will gradually lead to the fact that fans of traditional videotapes will have to say goodbye to their clumsy “video boxes”: current alternative technologies are of much better quality, and moreover, they have a constant tendency to become cheaper. (Potentially, with increasing popularity, they will cost even less, than analog formats that have already reached their “ceiling”).
The excellent quality of DVD video recorded in MPEG-2 format is already capable of encouraging the average viewer to switch. The only limiting factor at the moment is that DVDs cannot yet be burned at home.
The hurdle is quite serious: many of us like to shoot home videos on amateur camcorders, rewrite movies, and play around with video editing. Furthermore, even with the massive proliferation of DVD-RAM in the foreseeable future, camcorders are unlikely to switch to new media (although Sony has already released digital cameras that use MD discs as media).
However, in addition to digital video DVDs, the MPEG-2 compression algorithm (albeit somewhat simplified and modified) is used in modern digital video in DV format (as opposed to the classic MPEG algorithm with I, B and P frames, in DV the data is recorded on cassettes using compression based on I-frames only). Furthermore, in the DV format, unlike Motion-JPEG, both intra-frame compression, in which each frame is compressed by itself, without taking into account the information of adjacent frames, and inter-field compression, which applies analyzing still images in adjacent frames using the same background. These compression algorithms produce very few artifacts. At the same time, video in DV (I-MPEG) format looks much better than the current de facto standard for non-linear editing systems: M-JPEG (Motion-JPEG) and,
For storing large amounts of video data at 500 TVL (TVL) resolution in component format with separate chrominance and luminance signals (Y, RY and BY) and 4: 1: 1 sampling (4: 2: 0 ) on small media, DV format uses 5: 1 compression (fixed stream – 3.6 MB / s). At the same time, Sony experts say that the quality of DV images is not inferior to the modern professional standard Betacam SP used in studio video equipment (differences appear only in the case of additional video processing as a result of compression image and some loss of color information during sampling). Professional modifications to the DV standard are also being successfully introduced: Sony’s DVCAM and Panasonic’s DVCPRO (in the latest implementations of these formats, the same 4: 2: 2 sampling is used as in Betacam SP).
Excellent consumer digital cameras already exist on the mass market.
