• What is Digital Video?
• What is Digital Video Editing?
• What is Non Linear Editing?
• What is Linear Editing?
• What is a video capture card?
• What is Fireire?
• What is rendering?
• What is real-time?
• What are NTSC and PAL standards?
• What is Timeline playback?
• What is MPEG?
• What is titling?
• What is Time based corrector (TBC)?
• What is wipe?
• What is generation loss?

There are two basic formats for recording: Analog and Digital. VHS Beta SuperVHS are the most common examples of analog formats. While DV and MiniDV are digital formats. Any electronic means by which moving images are captured stored and presented can be considered video. Today however using technology video can be digitized — that is converted from an analog format to a digital format. Thus digital video refers to any video that is stored in the digital format. These videos can be edited and stored or presented through various digital media.

Using your computer to edit videos can be termed as Digital video editing or Desktop video editing. With PCs becoming fast and storage capacity increasing it is has become very easy to capture video directly from your camcorder and transfer it to your computer and edit it. Moreover with available software and hardware you can add all kinds of effects filters and jazz up your videos. You can make your own copies for the web or even burn it to a CD or DVD.

Non Linear Editing or NLE is to access the footage from the hard drive randomly and instantly so that you can manipulate watch any part of the file in a non-linear mode and store it on your hard drive. Non Linear Editing software is timeline based. Each shot is placed on the timeline. You can lay down more than one track of video and audio onto the timeline.

When video is edited and recorded in a chronological manner it is called linear editing. Tape-based VCD-to-VCR editing can be termed as linear editing.

A hardware that captures digital video and audio to a hard drive typically through a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port is called as a video capture card. These cards use hardware or software compression to digitize the video.

Developed by Apple and Texas Instruments FireWire is a high speed serial bus that allows for the connection of up to 63 devices. FireWire is widely used for downloading video from digital camcorders to the computer. Also known as the IEEE 1394 or iLink it is the hottest technology in digital video.

To play the edited video back to the tape the computer ‘renders’ or applies the changes to the video that has been edited. Thus rendering is the process of applying effects to a video or to convert digital video to a different format.

The actual time in which a physical process under computer study or control occurs without any delay. If a transition that is applied to a video occurs real-time there is no waiting; the computer creates the effect or transition on the fly showing it immediately on the screen.

NTSC stands for National TV Standards Committee; the committee that developed the television standards for the U.S. NTSC is also used in Canada Japan South Korea and several Central and South American countries. PAL stands for Phase Alternate Line PAL signal standard is used in Europe and America. PAL is incompatible with NTSC.

Timeline Playback technology implemented by most of the leading hardware/software vendors allows you to play video directly from the timeline. All transitions and effects are first rendered into temporary files and then the entire video is played out without rendering a new second video file.

MPEG (pronounced M-peg) which stands for Moving Picture Experts Group is the name of family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g. movies video music) in a digital compressed format. The major advantage of MPEG compared to other video and audio coding formats is that MPEG files are much smaller for the same quality. This is because MPEG uses very sophisticated compression techniques. (source: http://MPEG.org)

Adding on-screen text as captions credits or any text to the video is known as ‘Titling’. Generally titling software’s are bundled with video editors.

Electronic device that corrects timing inconsistencies in a videotape recorder's playback stabilizing the image for optimum quality. TBC also synchronizes video sources allowing image mixing.

Transition from one shot to another where a moving line or pattern reveals the new shot can be termed as wipe.

Detoriation in audio-video quality due to duplicating from analog source to another source is called as generation loss. Digital transfers are free of generation loss.