Uncompressed video

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Uncompressed video is digital video that either has never been compressed or was generated by decompressing previously compressed digital video. It is commonly used by video cameras, video monitors, video recording devices (including general-purpose computers), and in video processors that perform functions such as image resizing, image rotation, deinterlacing, and text and graphics overlay. It is conveyed over various types of baseband digital video interfaces, such as HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort and SDI. Standards also exist for the carriage of uncompressed video over computer networks.

Some HD video cameras output uncompressed video, whereas others compress the video using a lossy compression method such as MPEG or H.264. In any lossy compression process, some of the video information is removed, which creates compression artifacts and reduces the quality of the resulting decompressed video. When editing video, it is preferred to work with video that has never been compressed (or was losslessly compressed) as this maintains the best possible quality, with compression performed after completion of editing.^[1]

Uncompressed video should not be confused with raw video. Raw video represents largely unprocessed data (e.g. without demosaicing) captured by an imaging device.