First of all, it should be noted that, without exception, all modern digital video cameras use certain compression algorithms and compression of the original video, and the “recording format” just characterizes the compression algorithms used. Let’s see what recording formats are found today in standard-resolution digital video cameras; we will talk about high-resolution video cameras separately, a little later.

DV is a video format with frame-by-frame compression (compression), that is, each frame of the video is compressed individually. At the same time, the compression ratio can be variable within the same frame — areas of the image that are difficult to compress are compressed with a lower compression ratio, and simple ones with a larger one. In this case, the total compression ratio for the entire frame remains constant (5: 1). The resulting stream for video is approximately 25 Mbps. The DV frame size is fixed and is (for the PAL standard) 720×576 pixels. This format is used in miniDV camcorders, and video recording, respectively, is performed on miniDV cassettes. Continue reading →