Video Digitization - Video digitization is the conversion of video component signals or composite signal into digital form through the use of an analog-to-digital (pronounced A to D) converter. The A/D converter periodically senses (samples) the level of the analog signal and creates a binary number or series of digital pulses that represent the level of the signal.

Video Frame Structure - Video frame structure is the division of defined lengths of media (such as a sequence of images in a video) into different field (information) parts. Video frame structure commonly defines independent (key) frames, predicted (adjacent) frames, and bi-directional (created from the comparison of multiple frames) frames. Key frames contain all of the information of an image and the predicted and bi-directional frames contain the difference elements from other frames which results in much lower data that is required to recreate the images.

This figure shows how key frames can be used to reduce the amount of data that is transmitted for video signals. This example shows two scenes in a video clip. The first scene is of a sail boat that is slowly moving across the horizon on the water and the second scene is of a house on the shoreline. This example shows that a key frame is sent at the beginning of a scene and only changes to the key frame are necessary to send. When a new scene occurs, a new key frame is sent.