pixel is the short term fro picture element, graphic monitors show picture by dividing the screen into thousands of little pixels which are arranged into rows and columns, the are that close together that when you look at them they appear connected, the number of bits represents how many shades of grey or colours can be shown, e.g. 8 bit colour modes, the monitor uses 8 bits per pixel, on colour monitor each pixel is compose of three different dots a red dot, a blue dot and a green on usually the three dots should merge tot he same point but most monitor have a convergence error which tends to make the pixels appear fuzzy.
Resolution
Resolution is the sharpness and clarity of a image, the term is used mainly to describe graphic monitors, bit mapped graphic images and printers, for laser and dot matrix printers the resolution indicates the number of dots per inch where as for graphic printers the resolution shows the number of dots on the whole screen, printers, scanners, monitors and other I/O devices are classed as either high, medium or low resolution. The actual resolution ranges for each of these classes is constantly changing as the technology improves.
Screen ratios
screen ratio is the proportional relationship between its width and its height, it is usually shown as two number which are separated by a colon e.g. 16:9. no matter how small or big a image is, when its width is divided into x units of length and its height is measured using the same length unit but the height will be measured to be y units, e.g. a image with the ratio of 16:9 the image is 16 inches wide and 9 inches high.
frame rate
Frame rate in television and computer video displays is the number of frames or image on the screen per second, in motion pictures frame rates are standardized by the society of motion picture and television editors, the time code frame rates 24, 25 and 30 frames per second very common, the rate form professional motion pictures is 24 and 30 frames per second for television. in computer video stream the frame rate is used to describe the playback rates for AVI and QuickTime movies, for AVI and QuickTime movies the frame rates directly relates to the smoothness of the playback, the higher the frames per second the smoother the video will playback, the lower the frame rates the choppier the playback.
video formats
video format is what a video is formatted to common formats are DV, HDV and HDV, tape based formats such as DV and HDV can be transferred to computers for editing via firewire. file based formats such as AVCHD are already stored as files and can be transferred to a computer using a USB or a card reader.
video compression is when a video is packed into a smaller file,there are two types of this lossy compression and lossless compression.
lossy compression means the filled is compressed but the file has less data than the original file, in some cases the quality is lost due to the video compression, but lossy makes up for the loss in quality by producing small files e.g. DVDs are compressed using MPEG-2 format which makes the file 15 to 30 times smaller than the original but we see DVDs as having high quality.
lossless compression is compression where no of the quality is lost, this is not as useful as lossy compression because the files often end up being the same size as the original which is pointless because by compressing the video you want it smaller, using lossless compression will result in perfect image quality e.g. if i video editor was to transfer files from one computer to another using a hard drive the editor would choose lossless compression to preserve the quality which they are still editing.
video composting video composting in video terms is merging two different video tracks in order to produce a brand new single image frame from the combined tracks, the terms is also used when describing the overlaying of text on video clips.
video composting in graphic terms is superimposing one image over the top of another to create a new single image.