Digital Media Foundations

Introductory Thoughts

• Welcome
• What you should know before you begin
• The journey light takes from subject to screen
• What is a pixel?

1. How Do Computers Think?

• Binary, the language of computers
• Why do computers like binary?
• How 1s and 0s make larger numbers

2. How Cameras and Computers Think about Color

• How bright is fully bright?
• Breaking it down into bit depth
• How bit depth mixes with color channels
• What's the difference between 8 bit, 10 bit, 12 bit, and beyond?
• Understanding depth of field
• What difference does shooting stereoscopic 3D make?

3. The Language of Color

• What are color modes?
• Computer screens like RGB
• Cameras and TVs like YUV
• Comparing RGB and YUV
• Printers prefer CMYK
• All about alpha: Adding transparency
• Masking areas of the picture with chroma key and luma key
• Reducing the burden with color subsampling
• High dynamic range: The biggest thing since color
• What are legal levels?
• Merging images with blend modes

4. The Shape of Your Picture and the Speed of Your Video

• Pixel aspect ratios: Pixels have a shape too
• What is a frame and a field?
• Frame sizes, large and small
• Frame rates, fast and slow
• Measuring time with timecode
• Why do we use drop frame timecode?
• Showing frames on screens with their own refresh rates

5. Storing Everything (Codecs)

• What is a codec?
• Small file, big picture: What is video compression?
• How much data is enough data?
• What matters most when storing color, light, and sound
• Delivery specifications: Working out how to deliver video and sound
• What’s in a file format?: Understanding .mov, .mxf, and more
• The magic of vector graphics

6. Color Wheels, Vectorscopes, and Waveforms

• What do color wheels actually show you?
• Getting to grips with a vectorscope
• Understanding waveforms
• Getting a little more detail with an RGB Parade
• Seeing an overview of the color and light with a histogram

7. Making Changes

• Natural adjustments made with color wheels
• Precision adjustments made with Curves
• Expanding (and compressing) the luma range with Levels
• Selecting exactly the tone you want with Color Pickers

8. Audio Made Simple

• Creating space with channels
• Measuring the power of your sound with amplitude
• Capturing tone as frequency
• It’s all in the timing, or rather, the phase

Conclusion

• Goodbye