Today all the video that exists in the market is digital, leaving analog video as a historical relic and therefore of the past. How has this transition occurred and what role has PC hardware played in this process?
In the middle of the era where all video is digital, many of you will wonder what the point of knowing analog video. The answer? Digital video appeared yesterday afternoon in regard to the history of audiovisual content, so a large amount of video content is in analog format and is therefore a very important weight in the history of cinema and television.
Analog versus digital video
Let’s not forget that human beings experience the world around us in analog format. So in your day to day you capture reality in analog format. But what do we mean by analog? In the digital world when data is transmitted they do so as a succession of binary signals, two values, but when the data is analog then this signal can have any value.
If we took the analog signal and digitized it into a digital signal with a very low amount of data then we would not get a sine wave but a square wave. For example the sound called “8 bits” is nothing more than the square wave simplification of the different notes. How then is it possible to digitize a digital signal? Well, adding a greater amount of value changes over time, to bring the signal as closely as possible to the analog model.
So when digitizing data, if we want to achieve greater fidelity to reality in a digital system, and therefore a closer approach to reality, then we need a greater amount of data. Hence, the use of video will begin to emerge with 32-bit processors, since they could work with sufficient precision on the data.
How do I get the digital video to the PC?
The first video digitizer to be used in a computer did not appear for the PC, but for the Commodore Amiga, which arrived in 1990 with New Tek’s Video Toaster. An expansion card that was precisely in charge of taking the NTSC signal and digitizing it for later manipulation, with this the possibility of editing analog video in real time was born.
With the collapse of the Commodore Business Machines bankruptcy in 1994 and with the Apple Macintosh being a niche, then all the interest in multimedia turned to the PC where a version of Video Toaster was released, as well as some cards for processing video by part of various brands, all of them based on the use of digital signal processors or DSP, which were added in the first PCs with multimedia capabilities to be able to efficiently treat this volume of data, apart from being able to encode and decode video in real time.
Over time, the arrival of increasingly powerful processors and digital video ended up eliminating the need to use this type of card for digital video manipulation, which led to the appearance of non-professional programs in the style of iMovie from Apple or Microsoft‘s Windows Movie Make.
How do I replace analog video to digital?
There are three main advantages to digital video over analog video, which have given it dominance in the market over analog video, which has become a relic in history. All three have completely changed the way video is produced, distributed and stored.
Ability to process data in real time
The first of all is that it allows the manipulation of the data by a processor with the ability to manipulate data in digital format, that is, in binary. Which has a series of clear consequences if we take into account that through a processor or CPU we can manipulate them. This allows video editing, in real time and access to any data.
Those of you who have edited video using analog tape format, you will remember how one hour in analog television resolution required 13 GB of information that had to be dumped from the DV tape to the PC storage disk, so that the CPU could access the timeline. This was impossible to do on tape directly.
Ability to catalog and distribute data
The second is the ability to use metadata, which is data about the data. For example, the metadata for a music file is things like artist name, album, date, genre, and so on.
Data of the same type can be applied for video files. Which allows us to organize searches through those metadata or keywords. If that data is also in the cloud, then we can set up a digital streaming platform in which to distribute content all over the world. So without digitization we would not have platforms like Netflix, Twitch, Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc.
The other point is that we can distribute any data in binary, and therefore that has been previously digitized, through the internet. What has allowed the creation of new business models.
Content quality does not degrade
The third reason has to do with the adoption of digital formats, the first digital format being the Laser-Disc, which was the true predecessor of DVD. The Laser-disc was not very successful for the cost of its players, but its video quality did not degrade as it happened with the video tapes used to store analog video, which over time have had to be digitized. and in some cases it has been too late and they have been lost forever.
Although the digital video boom did not come until the 2000s, a period when real-time video decoding was so cheap in terms of processing that a simple decoder chip cost a few cents.
Today the optical disc formats for movies are about to disappear, replaced by the breakthrough innovation that has been digital video streaming. The demand in addition to series on demand not only new but old has accelerated that many analog videos stored in the archives of many film production companies are digitized.