Color Space

From Streaming 411

Color Spaces

RGB (Red, Green, Blue) is the most widely used electronic colour space. To get the color white, we must add the maximum amount of all the colour channels - this is why RGB is called an additive colour space and why it's impractical for example for printing. There are many more colour spaces, each one with certain characteristics that make it well suited for a certain task and DV is no exception.

When the television moved on to colour broadcast, the engineers had to figure out a way to make the new colour programming compatible with the old B&W recievers. They decided to do this by separating the luminance (brightness) channel from the colour information and so the YUV color space was born.

The native colour space for DV is YUV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV) which is often also written as YCrCb. Just like with RGB, the letters stand for channels - Y is luminance, C (chrominance, or "colour")r is actually Red and C (for "chrominance")b is actually Blue. So instead of red, green and blue, we use luminance, red and blue.