The digital signal

Limitation of analogue signal

The analogue signal can suffer degradation during processing through the signal chain particularly in multi-generation editing where impairment to the signal is cumulative. By coding the video signal into a digital form, a stream of numbers is produced which change sufficiently often to mimic the analogue continuous signal (see figure opposite).

The digital signal

Whereas an analogue signal is an unbroken voltage variation, a pulse coded modulated (PCM) digital signal is a series of numbers each representing the analogue signal voltage at a specific moment in time. The number of times the analogue signal is measured is called the sampling rate or sampling frequency. The value of each measured voltage ...

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