As video technology steams full speed ahead into the digital domain, the shortcomings and degradations associated with analog technology which video engineers have come to accept and deal with are rapidly disappearing. In their place, however, are new problems. Digital devices and systems bring their own unique mix of issues that must be addressed, including:

• Quantization. The quantization process, by design, discards information. It takes an analog waveform with infinite variability and blocks it into a collection of bits, the number of which is determined by the bit length of the system.

• Concatenation. Defined as the connection of elements end-to-end, concatenation for video and audio describes the effects of chaining compression and decompression systems.

• Video Processing. It is commonly assumed that as long as a video clip is manipulated in the digital domain, it will not be degraded. In a general sense this is true, however, certain operations will discard information that can not be recreated downstream. Changes in sizing, adjustment of color hue and saturation, and adjustment of luminance values are just some of the operations that can result in degradation of the signal unless proper precautions are taken. Something as simple as improper gamma setup on monitors can result in a host of problems as the signal...