Bit rate reduction-the key to a new era in digital video recording

The authors discuss the technique of bit rate reduction. With the increasing interest in digital signal processing in all areas of the video industry there have been important advances in past years. The ability to reduce substantially the source data rate has been known for some time, and due to breakthrough it has been possible to fully exploit the redundancy inherent in the television signal. Europe is turning towards this technology for the practical realisation of point to point contribution links. The EBU have standardised on a 34 Mbit/sec link using the reduction technique of discrete cosine transforms (DCT), but clearly the amount of data reduction in such schemes, approaching 10 to 1 or more, plus the use of the (temporal) redundancy between fields and frames, leads to the possibility of some artefacts in critical material or where there is excessive motion