Glossary » S

Sony/Philips Digital Interface - a standard for digital audio outputs and inputs in IT and consumer electronics devices. S/PDIF connectors usually come in two different shapes, Coaxial (which is electrical S/PDIF) and Toslink (which is optical S/PDIF). There is no difference in the sound quality of the two connections, only the cable types differ.

The quality of colour that distinguishes a hue from white. For example, pastel shades are desaturated, whereas vivid colours are saturated.

Preset camera modes with automatic settings optimised for common compositions like night-time, landscape or portraits.

The process by which video and audio is viewed as though played back using a shuttle control. Used for quickly locating an edit point.

A feature of some CRTs in which a perforated metal plate typically made from invar is placed behind the phosphor layer to prevent the electron beams from striking adjacent pixels. The beams pass through the perforations in the mask so that they converge on the correct phosphor dots.

Opens briefly to expose light to camera’s sensor. The speed of the shutter can be used to control the exposure – typical shutter speeds range from several seconds to as quick as 2000th of a second. Fast shutter speeds let in least light, but also freeze action, while slow ones let in more light, but blur movement. Note longer shutter speeds may require a tripod or solid base to prevent user camera shake.

Exposure mode which allows manual control of the shutter speed, while automatically adjusting the aperture iris to compensate and create a perfect exposure.

The addition of a data channel to the AGP bus which allows two way simultaneous communication. An 8bit side band signal can be sent along the existing 32bit AGP bus allowing data to be sent even if the host is busy sending or receiving other data.

A way of describing traditional photography. Photographic film was originally coated with a layer of a silver halide solution, to make it sensitive to light.

Character animation amongs other things relies on the use of “bones” and joints to create realistic movement, however the geometry from which 3D models are built is not designed to smooth out sharp bends in a convincing or a realistic way. Skinning is a procedure designed to smooth out the geometry and textures at the points where bends are created between bones.

A type of shadow mask that borrows some of the advantages of an aperture grille in that vertical slots rather than round perforations are used.

Small Office or Home Office

Stateful Packet Inspection. A type of firewall that reads and stores information about outbound data which it uses to compare with data inbound from the Internet. If the incoming data was not requested by a user behind the firewall it is rejected.

screen Red Green Blue. A colour standard developed in order to maintain colour consistency between other sRGB compliant devices.

A small portion of quickly and easily accessed memory set aside to store data that may need to be modified quickly in response to demands from the frame currently being calculated.

An element that’s smaller than a pixel. Used by systems for greater accuracy in effects calculations.

Applicable to LCDs. Each pixel is made up of three independently controlled sub-pixels. In a colour display these sub-pixels have red, green, or blue colour filters.

Fujifilm’s proprietary imaging chip, which uses octagonal shaped pixels, arranged closely in a honeycombed pattern. Fujifilm claims this increases sensitivity along with apparent horizontal and vertical resolution, and as such justifies the scaling of images in-camera.

This is one of the methods used for averaging out the colour of a pixel in order to perform anti-aliasing. A scene is rendered at a much higher resolution than is required and the extra colour information is used to accurately determine and average out pixel colours for later use on the lower resolution scene.

Super-Video. This is a high quality method of transporting video accomplished by keeping colour and light information separate. This results in less colour bleeding and a generally better quality image the using composite.