How to Understand Digital Video Terms

Taking and editing video is a great way to share and preserve memories. Like anything digital, though, there are some terms that often can lead to confusion, or just make it seem more complicated than it actually is.

Confusing Terms

If you’re cruising the internet and you’re trying to compare your smartphone camera to a Sioeye, or GoPro, there are going to be a lot of terms to compare—most of which are highly abbreviated and therefore meaningless to anyone who isn’t familiar with what the abbreviations mean.

What Are 1080p, 720p, 4k, 2.7k?

If you see a number abbreviated with a ‘p’ or a ‘k,’ there’s a good chance that term is referring to resolution. You can think of resolution as how many dots appear on the screen. If you were to start at the top of your screen and count all of the dots from top to bottom, that is the number you would see advertised. 1080p is full high definition. The 1080 means that there are one thousand and eighty pixels vertically. In actuality, the resolution is 1080 pixels high and 1920 wide. So when you see 720p or 1080p, just know that those numbers mean vertical pixels.

What’s the difference between ‘k’ and ‘p’ though? In the metric system, k refers to thousand. When you look at 4k video, it means that there are four thousand pixels vertically. It would be exactly the same thing as saying 4000p. So when you’re comparing TV and computer monitor resolutions, you can multiply the ‘k’ by a thousand to convert to pixels.

So why does all of this talk of pixels’ matter? Well, if you’re buying a TV or computer monitor, the more pixels the crisper the image and better quality overall. However, all the extra pixels mean a lot more data. As a general rule of thumb, most digital TV subscriptions will have 1080p channels, and some 4k channels.  

When it comes to cameras, I always opt for the highest resolution possible. This is because you’ll get the highest resolution picture. Just keep in mind that when you buy a camera with the ability to record 1080p and 4k video that the higher resolution means that you’ll have much larger video files. If you’re concerned about file size, you can always make the files smaller by converting to a smaller resolution. However, you can never increase resolution. Think of it like a song, you can cut 30 seconds off of the end to make it shorter, but you can’t magically add 30 seconds to a song.

What Is FPS?

When you’re watching a video, you’re actually watching a ton of pictures one right after the other. It’s basically a flipbook where as you flip through the pages, an image appears to move. When you’re watching normal TV, the screen will typically show around 30 pictures a second, also known as frames. That’s where the term FPS comes from—frames per second. 

If you’re trying to catch the perfect moment of a sports game, or are riding your mountain bike down a hill and want a clear image, high frames per second would be best.

Why does frames per second matter? Well if you take a video at 120fps, that is 120 frames in one second. That’s 120 separate pictures. Higher FPS is best for fast moving video, or when you want to slow a video down for a slow motion effect. You’ll see camera’s advertised as being able to take a range of video from 480fps all the way down to 30fps. High fps is great for action cameras like the Sioeye and GoPro because it can easily capture everything that is happening, avoiding most blur.

What’s interesting though is that you’ll see cameras that can take videos in 1080p at 30 frames per second, but if you reduce the resolution to 720p they can take video at a faster framerate say 60 frames per second. Basically you can take really nice high definition video at lower speeds because the picture quality is much better, or you can take a lot of smaller pictures pretty quickly.

This becomes important when considering what you’re videotaping. If you’re trying to catch the perfect moment of a sports game, or are riding your mountain bike down a hill and want a clear image, high frames per second would be best. If you’re trying to take a video of slow moving scenery where speed isn’t an issue, you’ll opt for a higher resolution video over high fps.

What Is Hertz?

On TV’s you’ll often see hertz, abbreviated with Hz. This is for all intents and purposes framerate; it’s how often a pixel can change color on a TV. Hertz by definition is cycles per second and is typically used with radio. When a TV is advertised with having a 120Hz refresh rate, you can take that to mean it can display 120 frames a second.

The higher the hertz the more frames a TV can show, which for sports and action movies means a much better experience. However, keep in mind that anything passed 60hz is pretty much overkill and you’ll never notice the difference, nor will much video content be produced past 60fps.