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Glossary |
# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Glossary / C
CCD is an acronym for Charge Coupled Device. The CCD is a small rectangular electronic chip which detects the light from the camcorder lens. The CCD contains thousands of light sensitive pixels which are used to form the image.
The number of possible colours in an image is called the image's colour depth. Colour depth is usually expressed in the number of bits that are used to store the colour. Popular colour depths are 8 bits (256 colours), 16 bits (65,536 colours) and 24 bit (over 16 million colours).
Composite video is method of transferring a video signal down a 2-connector cable. The composite video signal includes all aspects of the video signal (colour and brightness), but does not carry sound.
Some data, especially video and audio data, can be made smaller by using a process called compression. Compression works by looking at the data and deciding whether there is any way of expressing the information in a simpler form. In the case of video and audio compression, this works by removing elements of the data that the viewer or listener is unlikely to notice have gone missing. This form of compression is called lossy compression, as data is lost during the process.
Other compression schemes manage to keep all the data, but express it in a more compact form. ZIP files are an example of a compression scheme that is lossless. Lossless compression schemes usually do not compress as well as lossy schemes. Most audio and video compression schemes are lossy, in order to achieve high levels of compression.