digital video format
DV formats hide several standardized recording formats for digital camcorders, which differ in the magnetic tapes and thus also in the cassette size. DV cassettes are available in BetacamSP format, VHS format and MiniDV format.
The DV format belongs to the standard definition( SD) formats, it has been defined by several manufacturers and is known as DVCAM, DVC, DVCPro, MiniDV and Digital-8( D8). All DV formats have a resolution of720 x 576 pixels, the bidl change frequency for the DV format is 25 Hz, for other DV variants it is twice as high. For data reduction, the color signal in the component video is recorded with a color subsampling of 4:2:0 and a quantization of 8 bits. With a compression method similar to Motion JPEG( MJPEG), a further data reduction by a factor of 5 is achieved. The resulting data rate for video is 25 Mbit/s. There are minor differences in sound recording. It is digital with a sampling rate of 48 kHz and a sampling depth of 16 bits for stereo. Deviating from this, some DV variants record the sound with 12 bit resolution in four channels at a sampling rate of 32 kHz.
The crucial difference between the different DV variants is the tape runtime. This is 80 minutes for miniDV, DV has 270 minutes, DVCAM 50 and 180 minutes, and DVCPro 63 and 123 minutes. Panasonic has developed DVCPro, a variant of the DV format that uses 4:1:1 color subsampling.
The DV format has a relatively good quality and is used in the professional field for reportages.