Video Production Glossary


  1. Red-light - production has been rejected
  2. Yellow-light - production is in the process of acquiring funds/ approval
  3. Green-light - Production is budgeted and approved.
  4. Proposal - Initial yellow-light document, outlines basic concept of video.
  5. Treatment - Yellow/green-light document, outlines in more detail the concept of a video. Sometimes unnecessary.
  6. Script - Document detailing an outline of the overall story, and every line of dialogue to the word. This leaves a big gap for the directors ingenuity. E.g. a 20 minute epic battle sequence in which an army of tens of thousands storm a fort - the script can just say "they take the fort".


  1. Depth of field - amount of depth in focus (focus defined by circle of confusion)
  2. Circle of confusion - Governing the definition of "in focus", the radius of the focus "blur" in comparison to image resolution. I.e. focus blur radius must be equal-to or small-than the one pixel to be considered in focus.
  3. Prime lens - one or more pieces of glass able to focus light at varying depths. Usually contains an iris to limit amount of the light. No zoom function.
  10. 3-point Lighting - A common lighting technique for lighting simple/ small scenes. Consists of a key light, 45deg in front of subject, provides the most intense light for the scene and casts a shadow across reverse side of face; A fill light, opposite to key light, and provides a softer light to eliminate some of the shadow. Typically a fill light will eliminate 70 of shadow in broadcast - it eliminates usually 85-100% of shadow for web presenters. A "back" or "clip" light, used to lighten the top of the subjects head, intensity varies from rig to rig, short haired subjects typically have lower levels of backlight than those with long hair.


  1. Digitisation (digitising, to digitise) - The process of scanning each frame from a film-strip to create a digital video clip.
  4. Motion tracking - The process of taking a point in a shot and tracking it's movement from frame-to-frame.
  5. Camera tracking - Taking many motion tracking points and, using complex algorithms, calculated by the original camera movements through 3d space, the rough 3d layout of the scene, and the field of view the camera had at the time of capturing. The result allows 3d objects to be composited seemlessly within scenes - E.g. Gollum in Lord of the Rings.
  6. Colour Correction - The process, usually digital, of correcting footage's visual properties. This could be from under or over exposure, or from shooting a slightly different colour temperature than was present.
  7. Colour Grading - An artistic version of correction, this process uses the same techniques but may make an image coloured incorrectly for artistic reasons. E.g. a Matrix is tinted green, the real world is tinted blue - or more subtly the warm yellow light in the drawing scene in Titanic.
  8. Signal - Non random: The part of image or sound information we want.
  9. Noise - Random: The part of image or sound information we do not want - commonly seen as "grain" or heard as "static". "White noise" means noise at full amplitude. Blue and pink noise refer to noise with preference to high or low frequencies respectively.
  10. Grain - Commonly used to describe noise, grain is referring to the actual grain on a film-strip.

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