What are the DV artifacts I keep hearing about?
DV artifacts [Pix: Artifacts] come in three flavors: mosquito noise, quilting, and motion blocking. Other picture defects [Pix: Defects] encountered are dropouts and banding (a sign of tape damage or head clogging). The most noticeable spatial artifact is mosquito noise around any sharp, contrasty edges. These are compression-induced errors usually seen around sharp-edged fine text, dense clusters of leaves, and the like; they show up as pixel noise within 8 pixels of the fine detail or edge causing them. The best place to look for them is in fine text superimposed on a non-black background. White on blue seems to show it off best. The magnitude of these errors and their location tends to be such that if you monitor the tape using a composite video connection, the artifacts will often be masked by dot-crawl and other composite artifacts. A spatial quilting artifact can sometimes appear at the boundaries between 8×8 pixel blocks, most noticeable on shallow diagonals or on slightly-defoc
