Video is the technology that captures moving images electronically. Those moving images are really just a series of still images that change so fast that it looks like the image is moving.
The video clips may contain some dialogues or sound effects and moving pictures. These video clips can be combined with the audio, text and graphics for multimedia presentation.
Mostly the video available are in analog format. To make it usable by computer, the video clips are needed to be converted into computer understandable format, i.e., digital format. Both combinations of software and hardware make it possible to convert the analog video clips into digital format. As the digitised video clips take lots of hard disk space to store, depending on the frame rate used for digitization. The computer reads a particular video clip as a series of still pictures called frames. Thus video clip is made of a series of separate frames where each frame is slightly different from the previous one. The computer reads each frame as a bitmap image.
Generally there are 15 to 25 frames per second so that the movement is smooth. If we take fewer frames than this, the movement of the images will not be smooth. To cut down the space there are several modern technologies in windows environment. Essentially these technologies compress the video image so that lesser space is required.
However, latest video compression software makes it possible to compress the digitised video clips to its maximum. In the process, it takes lesser storage space. One more advantage of using digital video is, the quality of video will not deteriorate from copy to copy as the digital video signal is made up of digital code and not electrical signal. Caution should be taken while digitizing the video from analog source to avoid frame droppings and distortion. A good quality video source should be used for digitization.
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