A Digital Video Compression Primer

In the post-roll of last week’s VUC call I got into a thread about webcams and various aspects digital video encoding.  While many in the VUC audience already have some understanding of the related principles, it occurred to me that there may be some folks that visit this site who would be interested a primer on the basics of video compression.

Then by some serendipitous twist I found this video on the subject by Drew Tyler, Instructor of Digital Media at Weber State University in Utah. He covers the basics in a pretty good live presentation, even if he is a bit of an Apple fan-boy.

The program that he references near the end as “Sorenson” is Squeeze from Sorenson Media. The actual clip that he plays is called Encoding 101.

Bye the way, doesn’t the Canon camera at the start of this post look just plain goofy with a boom microphone holder but no boom mic actually mounted? The camera a Canon XA10, the very model that my wife uses from time to time at work.