Some of these audio terms are relevant to Encore directly and other terms are related to the audio and video industry in general. Some of the terms are "new" language adapted from the analog world from which many features of Encore, Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop are derived.

A

A/D Converter-Analog to Digital Converter

Many A/Ds are also D/As, which convert digital back to analog for monitoring.

AC-3

Dolby's Audio Compression scheme, 3 ^rd generation. Both stereo and 5.1 surround format files may be encoded to AC-3. Encore only supports the encoding of stereo audio, and import of 5.1 AC-3 files.

ACM

Audio Compression Manager, developed by Microsoft as the standard interface for signal processing of audio data in the Windows environment, particularly geared towards the WAV file format. Some tools allow custom ACM processes.

ADC

Another name for analog-to-digital converter.

AIFF

Audio Interchange File Format. Can be used for storing audio in high- or low-resolution formats and sharing them between computer systems.

Aliasing

The undesirable jagged or stair-stepped appearance of unfiltered angled lines in an image, graphic, or text.

In video, aliasing also refers to the visual-beating effect caused by sampling frequencies of an image being too low to reproduce correctly. Different video aliasing effects include raster scan aliasing (e.g., when sharp horizontal lines cause a flickering effect) and temporal aliasing (e.g., when wheel spokes appear to reverse direction). Contrast with antialiasing.

Alpha Channel

The fourth channel of a 32-bit RGB image that contains transparency in the...