Avid Express/Composer Definitions

I know when I first started editing and got into this great business, there were a lot of terms being thrown around that I did not understand. Having an understanding of some key words in the video and film world will help you communicate much better with your peers and co-workers. I will spend the next few entries defining a few key terms you may not hear enough to understand but when they do come up you will want to know what they mean.

Anti-aliasing: A computerized process of digitally smoothing out jagged lines around a graphic or title. This is especially important with large text and high contrast graphics.

Codec: This is simply either a compressing or decompressing of data to fit into package of either software or hardware. Some examples of codec are QuickTime, OMFI, MXF and so on.

Field: This is concerning interlaced video. A field is half the scan lines of each frame of interlaced video. Standard NTSC video contains 60 fields in the 30 frame per second. So their exists two fields per frame of video. You will mostly find that most systems use the odd numbered lines to make up one field and the even numbered lines for the other.

Video Gain: This refers to the amount of white in a video picture.

Gamma: This is the measurement of the midpoint in the luminance range of an image. Used in color adjustment to control proportions of brighter and darker areas in an image.

IRE: This is a very important unit of measurement if your productions go to broadcast. IRE is used to measure the video waveform for your video levels. You do not want to exceed 235 IRE in your broadcast productions.

Hopefully this will give you a little more vocabulary knowledge to either impress your peers or at least understand what they are talking about. Stay tuned for more!