DV is an international standard for consumer digital video, originally decided on by 10 companies the DV consortium has grown to include over 60 different companies.  DV was originally called DVC (Digital Video Cassette) thats right! DV Is a cassette!? YES! They DO still exist! *shock*
Well of sorts, the Mini DV used most commonly looks like a shrunk down version of the old VHS tapes we used to watch Transformers and Thundercats on. These super, DV tapes are used everywhere in high quality cameras, consumer cameras and the DV setting in the After Effects. The idea being that you record some video, put it in After Effects and export it then you could put it back on to DV tape and it wouldn’t have lost any quality.

DV video usually runs at about 25-29 megabits per second, this is pretty high for internet streaming so its not very useful for that BUT it is fine when you are recording video on your camera. DV cassettes are used in many different types of camera from professional HD broadcast quality camera to the consumer camcorder you may have at home. This does not mean that your cheap camera will be the same quality as the pro version, that has a lot to do with the CCD and the lens the camera uses, but thats a blog for a different day. Generally when I’ve used DV it’s been to save the raw video files from the camera and when I’ve wanted a top high quality video with no loss on the compression.

What’s this DV PAL, DV NTSC all about?
PAL and NTSC are to formats of video used in the UK and the USA. First time I ever saw PAL/NTSC was on my old SNES console when I tried to connect it to the TV. PAL is used in the UK and NTSC in the US. They are different frame rates and resolutions. Basically it boils down to the frequency of electricity in the sockets, yes electricity has a frequency! In the UK it’s 50 and in the US its 60, meaning that video frame rates in the UK are 25fps and in the US 30fps. Also the way the frames are made up slightly differently:

• PAL uses 625 individual scan lines NTSC has 535.
• PAL resolution is 720 x 569, NTSC is 720 x 480

Anyone who lives in the UK may have seen some dodgy american sitcom that has been transferred for british TV and thought that it looked a little odd, well that is why! ^_^

I hope that has helped you understand what DV means when you see it in your video application of choice now ^_^

Further reading…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DV

http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL
http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Articles/PALvsNTSC/PALvsNTSC.asp

…Still with me? I’m hungry now >_>

This means you can use H.264 compression for your 3G mobile device videos as well as your HDDVD releases. It does a whole load of complicated calculations with pixels to make the files sizes smaller and more accurate. I don’t want to go in depth with these because unless you are planning to write your own video compression technique it will be lost on your or useless. Never the less I will provide links at the end of the blog to some sites explaining the heavier stuff for some further reading.

Here are some examples of H.264 usage that I borrows from the apple website

H.264 is the latest compression technique out there and is used in the new Quicktime, and DivX players as well as many other new technologies. It has been accepted as part of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) which have lead the standard for video compressions through out time.  Its where it’s at basically, and I’d recommend using it if you want to hang with the cool kids. Now actually making your videos look good and not take up half your hard drive with this compression technique is another story. As will all video compression you need to set the right aspect ratio, frame rates and video quality to get the balance just right. This I am going to talk about in my further blogs,

Also see…
www.vcodex.com/h264.html
Wikipedia

.FLV is used to embed video on the web and can be found on YouTube.com, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, metacafe and many others.
Also see .SWF

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The major advantage of MPEG compared to other video and audio coding formats is that MPEG files are much smaller for the same quality. This is because MPEG uses very sophisticated compression techniques.”
-www.mpeg.org

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linear editing is seen to oppose non-linear editing because of the destructive nature, for example in film where the film would literally be cut and paste into position, once it was set there was no going back.

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It is seen to be apposed to linear editing because you have equal access to any frame of the audio/video at any time so the process can go back on its self (non-linear).

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