Member only
paag_guides_digital_video_archive_en.pdf
pdf
Type: Tools
What you will find in this resource:
Video is a technology developed in the second half of the 20th Century with the aim of making the electronic representation of moving images possible. In the first four decades of its existence, video signals were recorded in analogue form (continuous) onto a physical medium such as magnetic tape. At the turn of the century, digital video, in which video signals are transmitted through impulses or bits (discontinuous) and are encoded according to a binary numeric system, started to become widespread (although its development took place a few years earlier). Today, analogue video is an obsolete technology and, in all areas, has been replaced by digital video, from industrial production and commercial distribution to home video.
Magnetic videotapes are fragile materials, highly vulnerable to physical degradation. Furthermore, playing the tapes requires a video recorder, which nowadays, is difficult to find or to maintain in good working condition. For this reason, archives are working to digitalise magnetic videotapes in order to preserve their content. Thus, in archives, there are digital video documents that have been produced through the digitalisation of magnetic tapes side-by-side with those that were created in digital format.
If analogue video is defined by the physical characteristics of the medium (the width of the tape, the composition of magnetic particles, etc.) digital video is defined by a series of numeric parameters such as resolution, sampling rate, the quantification and bit depth, amongst others. The numerical differences of the various parameters, and the way they structure the data so that it is readable by a machine, is what gives rise to the various formats.
Languages:
- English
- Catalan
- Spanish
- French
Visit the Photographic and Audiovisual Archives Working Group (PAAG) pages