An introduction to video compression, Part II of a two-part series
A 90-minute course taught by Cliff Wootton

This course focuses on the practice and technology of video pre-processing, which is required for effective video compression.

Having learned how compression works in Part I, students are now taught how to exploit that knowledge while exploring the various pre-processing operations that can be performed on the content before it is encoded. With this knowledge, students will be able to make more informed decisions when shooting, editing and preparing content for compression.

The course is designed to help operators and engineers and content producers better understand the intricacies of video compression and how they can better operate, maintain and adjust their video systems for maximum image quality. This course assumes a basic understanding and familiarity with video and completion of Video Compression, Part I.

You will learn:

• The need for video preprocessing
• Designing a best workflow
• How shooting and edit decisions affect the end result
• Temporal complexity: field and frame issues
• Converting from film to video and back
• Cadence and field dropping issues
• Spatial quality: scratch, dust and noise repair
• Film grain noise removal and rate conversion
• Handing captions: The Gibbs effect and text
• Cropping, pre-scaling, aspect ratio, pan and scan
• Color grading
• Audio issues - lip sync
• Selecting the right codec

The Subject Matter Expert for this course is Cliff Wootton.

Cliff is currently working on research projects in the area of multimedia content production with a particular focus on how to produce interactive material in industrial quantities for deployment on the emerging I-P-T-V platforms.