CS631 Paper Response Form

Paper Title: The World of Digital Video

Author(s): Jim Blinn

Main Point(s):

The paper explains first how the analog NTSC standard is encoding information, because the digital video standard SMPTE 244M works very similar. For both, analog and digital, a frame is divided into to interleaved fields that consists of scan lines. A portion of the scan lines of each field and a portion of pixels of each scan line are unvisible and contain synchronization information or are necessary to retrace vertically and horizontally. Digital video color information is encoded as Y, Cr and Cb values that are sub-sampled at a ratio of 4:2:2.

Possible Use(s):

The TV-as-computer and computer-as-TV is just around the corner, so maybe it helps to know something about the underlying technology of TV images.

Extensions:

This standard leaves a lot of bits free that can be used for arbitrary information. It would be nice to have a STANDARD for incorporating production data (like bias and gain of the camera, the script of the movie, captions of the spoken text- whatever)in these empty bits so that yet-to-be-build higher level processing steps could take advantage of all this additional information.

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