Digital Media Versus Analog Media

Depending on the equipment you use to capture source material, you might find yourself working with different types of media during your project. You may use two general types of media as your source material digital and analog.

Digital media are created and saved as a digital file format that your computer can read. The same way you transfer the data of a text document on some type of disk, you can transfer your audio and video information. As you shoot using a digital camera, the information is stored as a complex series of 1s and 0s (digital information). This digital file format can be transferred to your computer and read by Premiere. Analog media cannot be read by your computer; it must be digitized into the system (which then creates a digital "copy" in a file format that your computer can understand). Your computer must have a capture card for you to get analog audio or video into Premiere.

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One advantage of digital media is that there is no loss of quality when you transfer the data. The fact that you are just transferring file information means that the quality should remain the same from the first transfer to the last. Analog signals lose quality when they are transferred over several generations.