BKSTS Full-day seminar

[This page describes a seminar that has already taken place.]

Hosted at Channel 4 Television, Westminster,
London, England, September 20, 1997

Digital Video Technology

On September 20, 1997, at the facilities of Channel 4 Television in London, England, I taught this intensive, one-day introduction to the technology of studio-quality digital video.

If you are a computer system designer, engineer, programmer, or technician, you know that it is easy to use computers to acquire, process, transmit, and display photographic-quality still colour pictures. But smooth motion and accurate colour reproduction require digital video technology, which has remained largely inaccessible to computer professionals. This seminar will help you learn how to use digital video technology to bring smooth motion and accurate colour to computing.

The seminar will introduce emerging standards for compressed digital video, including Digital Video Cassette (DVC) and its derivatives DVCAM, DVCPRO, and Digital-S. In addition, the seminar will introduce the technology of MPEG and Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), and high-definition television (HDTV).

This seminar is based on my book A Technical Introduction to Digital Video, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1996. Each attendee will receive a copy of the book, along with printed notes for the seminar.

Syllabus

The doors will open for registration at 8:30 am. The seminar will begin at 9:00 am and end at 5:00 pm.

Basic principles. Raster images. Viewing considerations. Luminance, CIE Y. Lightness, CIE L*. Signal, noise, bandwidth, and data rate. Spatiotemporal domains, spatial frequency. Motion portrayal. Colour in computing: bilevel, greyscale, pseudocolour, hicolour, truecolour.

Filtering and sampling. Filtering, sampling, aliasing, interpolation, decimation. Image digitization and reconstruction. Frequency interleaving.

Gamma and colour. Gamma in physics. Gamma in film. Surround effect. Gamma in video, computer graphics, SGI, and Macintosh. CIE  XYZ, xyY. Video R'G'B'. Colour transforms. Rec. 709. Constant luminance principle. Video luma, Y'. Luma and colour differences. Colour difference coding, chroma subsampling. B'-Y', R'-Y', Y'PBPR, Y'CBCR, Y'UV, Y'IQ colour difference components.

Analog video, NTSC and PAL. Interlace. Field, frame, line, subcarrier, and sample rates. Line-lock, subcarrier lock. Subcarrier regeneration. Quadrature modulation. Decoder and monitor controls. Scanning and sync, genlock, sync distribution. Broadcast standards. Analog videotape recording. VHS. Betacam.

Studio digital video. Digital video interfaces. Rec. 601, Rec. 656, SMPTE RP 125/EBU 3246, 4:2:2, 4fsc. Parallel digital, serial digital. Test signals. Digital processing: mixing, matting, effects. Digital videotape recording, D-1, D-2. Timecode, editing.

Introduction to M-JPEG compression, DVC, and IEEE 1394. Transform domain. Coefficient quantization. Huffman coding. JPEG. Rate control. Digital Betacam. DV interface. IEEE 1394 ("FireWire"). DVCAM, DVCPRO, and Digital-S.

Introduction to MPEG, DVD, and HDTV. Predictive coding. Motion estimation. Motion interpolation. Preprocessing. MPEG-1, MPEG-2. Profiles and levels. Studio standards. Advanced television (ATV). Transmission standards. Standards converters. Relation to cinema. Relation to computer industry.