MPEG

Short for Moving Picture Experts Group, and pronounced m-peg. The term also refers to the family of digital video compression standards and file formats developed by the group. MPEG achieves high compression rate by storing only the changes from one frame to another, instead of each entire frame.

There are three major MPEG video standards: MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.

•	The most common implementations of the MPEG-1 standard provide a video resolution of 352-by-240. This produces video quality slightly below the quality of conventional VCR videos.

•	MPEG-2 offers resolutions of 720x480 and 1280x720 at 60 fps, with full CD-quality audio.

•	MPEG-4 is a graphics and video compression algorithm standard that is based on MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and Apple QuickTime technology.

TV2003 reads MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 files, but MJPEG is the best format for detecting scene changes and fast updating of thumbnails, so you should always convert MPEG clips to MJPEG (or at least MPEG-4 that has the advantage of extremely good compression without losing scene change detection capabilities).

MPEG files are not space consuming. A one hour video clip will take up less than 2 GBs of hard drive space.