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I've written the following book review, which can be found at http://www.bnellis.com/viddemys
There is also a competition at this site and the winner will receive a free copy of the book, worth $69.95.
Title: Video Demystified, Fourth Edition
Author: Keith Jack
Publisher: Newnes
ISBN: 0 7506 7822 4
Price: USD 69.95, GBP 39.99, EUR 59.95
Format: Paperback, 927 pp + xxiii with CD-ROM, 20 chapters
Let me start this review by telling you what this book isn't; it is not a "how to ..." book. It is an authoritative book that is full of a fantastic amount of information that is there to help anyone who wishes to know what video is and how it works, often in great depth.
Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the book itself, let's have a look at the CD-ROM. Most of it is consecrated to a PDF version of the printed book. Of course, this is Acrobat-searchable so that, in the unlikely event of not finding a reference in the good index, all is not lost! It also has a series of colour bar and grey-scale patterns in all the usual sizes from 720 x 480 to 1920 x 1080, in TIF format. In addition, it provides links to trade associations, licensing authorities, standards organisations and the author's company, as well as a detailed glossary.
The first few chapters are an in-depth introduction to video, discussing such matters as the various formats, colour spaces, video signals and analogue and digital interfaces. The seventh chapter offers an insight in to how the signals are processed and converted. Chapter 8 describes in detail the PAL, SECAM and NTSC signal formats, along with all their variants, extensions, NICAM etc., while the following one covers encoding and decoding NTSC and PAL signals. The next five chapters, over nearly 300 pages, describe the various compression techniques, including H.261, H.263, H.264, DV25, DV50, DV100, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4; these chapters, alone, are worth the modest price of the book for their detail. After that, there are four chapters with descriptions of the four standards for digital broadcasting. Chapter 19 discusses IPTV, which is often described as streaming, in general terms, with emphasis on using MPEG-n as the compression method, supported by various means of network broadcasting. Finally, there is a very complete glossary of terms, over 54 dense pages.
Is there anything missing in the book? Well, yes, I would have liked to have seen more on DVD authoring structures and standards, other than what is mentioned in the chapter on MPEG-2. Also, there is a total blank on Microsoft Windows-related and other proprietary formats, such as ASF and WMV, which are not even mentioned in the glossary. However, these are minor omissions, in view of the wealth of information that is given.
One of the questions one often sees in forums is why editing in MPEG is undesirable and which formats are lossless or lossy. I have never seen a better explanation than in three sentences: "Perhaps most important, [M]JPEG is symmetrical, meaning the cost of encoding and decoding is roughly the same. MPEG, on the other hand, was designed primarily for mastering a video once and playing it back many times on many platforms. To minimize the cost of MPEG hardware decoders, MPEG was designed to be asymmetrical, with the encoding process requiring about 100x the computing power of the decoding process.". There are hundreds of similar explanations in the book, giving simple insights into this or that issue.
Owners of previous editions of this book will wish to know whether it justifies an upgrade. All the chapters have been re-edited, especially with regard to HDTV, and new chapters have been introduced on MPEG-4, H.264, SDTV/HDTV, ATSC/DVB, and Streaming Video.
So, who should buy this book? Obviously, I believe that professionals in any branch of the video business should have the technical understanding that it offers. On the other hand, anyone who buys an entry-level DV camcorder in the hopes of encoding amateur DVDs from it will probably find it overkill. In between, the enthusiast, who likes to understand what is happening with his system, would very likely profit from the amount of technical data it offers.
There is also a competition at this site and the winner will receive a free copy of the book, worth $69.95.
Title: Video Demystified, Fourth Edition
Author: Keith Jack
Publisher: Newnes
ISBN: 0 7506 7822 4
Price: USD 69.95, GBP 39.99, EUR 59.95
Format: Paperback, 927 pp + xxiii with CD-ROM, 20 chapters
Let me start this review by telling you what this book isn't; it is not a "how to ..." book. It is an authoritative book that is full of a fantastic amount of information that is there to help anyone who wishes to know what video is and how it works, often in great depth.
Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the book itself, let's have a look at the CD-ROM. Most of it is consecrated to a PDF version of the printed book. Of course, this is Acrobat-searchable so that, in the unlikely event of not finding a reference in the good index, all is not lost! It also has a series of colour bar and grey-scale patterns in all the usual sizes from 720 x 480 to 1920 x 1080, in TIF format. In addition, it provides links to trade associations, licensing authorities, standards organisations and the author's company, as well as a detailed glossary.
The first few chapters are an in-depth introduction to video, discussing such matters as the various formats, colour spaces, video signals and analogue and digital interfaces. The seventh chapter offers an insight in to how the signals are processed and converted. Chapter 8 describes in detail the PAL, SECAM and NTSC signal formats, along with all their variants, extensions, NICAM etc., while the following one covers encoding and decoding NTSC and PAL signals. The next five chapters, over nearly 300 pages, describe the various compression techniques, including H.261, H.263, H.264, DV25, DV50, DV100, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4; these chapters, alone, are worth the modest price of the book for their detail. After that, there are four chapters with descriptions of the four standards for digital broadcasting. Chapter 19 discusses IPTV, which is often described as streaming, in general terms, with emphasis on using MPEG-n as the compression method, supported by various means of network broadcasting. Finally, there is a very complete glossary of terms, over 54 dense pages.
Is there anything missing in the book? Well, yes, I would have liked to have seen more on DVD authoring structures and standards, other than what is mentioned in the chapter on MPEG-2. Also, there is a total blank on Microsoft Windows-related and other proprietary formats, such as ASF and WMV, which are not even mentioned in the glossary. However, these are minor omissions, in view of the wealth of information that is given.
One of the questions one often sees in forums is why editing in MPEG is undesirable and which formats are lossless or lossy. I have never seen a better explanation than in three sentences: "Perhaps most important, [M]JPEG is symmetrical, meaning the cost of encoding and decoding is roughly the same. MPEG, on the other hand, was designed primarily for mastering a video once and playing it back many times on many platforms. To minimize the cost of MPEG hardware decoders, MPEG was designed to be asymmetrical, with the encoding process requiring about 100x the computing power of the decoding process.". There are hundreds of similar explanations in the book, giving simple insights into this or that issue.
Owners of previous editions of this book will wish to know whether it justifies an upgrade. All the chapters have been re-edited, especially with regard to HDTV, and new chapters have been introduced on MPEG-4, H.264, SDTV/HDTV, ATSC/DVB, and Streaming Video.
So, who should buy this book? Obviously, I believe that professionals in any branch of the video business should have the technical understanding that it offers. On the other hand, anyone who buys an entry-level DV camcorder in the hopes of encoding amateur DVDs from it will probably find it overkill. In between, the enthusiast, who likes to understand what is happening with his system, would very likely profit from the amount of technical data it offers.
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