Animation and digital movies are sequences of bitmapped graphic scenes (frames, rapidly played back. Most authoring tools adapt either a frame or object oriented approach to animation.
Movie making tools typically take advantage of Quicktime for Macintosh and Microsoft Video for Windows and lets the content developer to create, edit and present digitized motion video segments.
Video formats
A video format describes how one device sends video pictures to another device, such as the way that a DVD player sends pictures to a television or a computer to a monitor. More formally, the video format describes the sequence and structure of frames that create the moving video image.
Video formats are commonly known in the domain of commercial broadcast and consumer devices; most notably to date, these are the analog video formats of NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. However, video formats also describe the digital equivalents of the commercial formats, the aging custom military uses of analog video (such as RS-170 and RS-343), the increasingly important video formats used with computers, and even such offbeat formats such as color field sequential.
Video formats were originally designed for display devices such as CRTs. However, because other kinds of displays have common source material and because video formats enjoy wide adoption and have convenient organization, video formats are a common means to describe the structure of displayed visual information for a variety of graphical output devices.
Common organization of video formats
A video format describes a rectangular image carried within an envelope containing information about the image. Although video formats vary greatly in organization, there is a common taxonomy:
• A frame can consist of two or more fields, sent sequentially, that are displayed over time to form a complete frame. This kind of assembly is known as interlace. An interlaced video frame is distinguished from a progressive scan frame, where the entire frame is sent as a single intact entity.
• A frame consists of a series of lines, known as scan lines. Scan lines have a regular and consistent length in order to produce a rectangular image. This is because in analog formats, a line lasts for a given period of time; in digital formats, the line consists of a given number of pixels. When a device sends a frame, the video format specifies that devices send each line independently from any others and that all lines are sent in top-to-bottom order.
• As above, a frame may be split into fields – odd and even (by line "numbers") or upper and lower, respectively. In NTSC, the lower field comes first, then the upper field, and that's the whole frame. The basics of a format are Aspect Ratio, Frame Rate, and Interlacing with field order if applicable: Video formats use a sequence of frames in a specified order. In some formats, a single frame is independent of any other (such as those used in computer video formats), so the sequence is only one frame. In other video formats, frames have an ordered position. Individual frames within a sequence typically have similar construction.
However, depending on its position in the sequence, frames may vary small elements within them to represent additional information. For example, MPEG-13 compression may eliminate the information that is redundant frame-to-frame in order to reduce the data size, preserving the information relating to changes between frames.
Analog video formats
• NTSC
• PAL
• SECAM
Digital Video Formats
These are MPEG13 based terrestrial broadcast video formats
• ATSC Standards
• DVB
• ISDB
These are strictly the format of the video itself, and not for the modulation used for transmission.
