Digital video is a type of video recording system that works by using a digital, rather than analog, representation of the video signal. This generic term is not to be confused with the name DV, which is a specific type of digital video targeted at the consumer market. Digital video is most often recorded on tape, then distributed on optical discs, usually DVDs. There are exceptions, such as camcorders that record directly to DVDs, Digital8 camcorders which encode digital video on conventional analog tapes, and camcorders which record digital video on hard disks.

History of digital Video:
Digital video was first introduced in 1983 with the Sony D-1 format, which recorded an uncompressed standard definition component video signal in digital form instead of the high-band analog forms that had been commonplace until then. Due to the expense, D-1 was used primarily by large television networks. It would eventually be replaced by cheaper systems using compressed data, most notably Sony's Digital Betacam, still heavily used as a field recording format by professional television producers.

Consumer digital video first appeared in the form of QuickTime, Apple Computer's architecture for time-based and streaming data formats, which appeared in crude form around 1990. Initial consumer-level content creation tools were crude, requiring an analog video source to be digitized to a computer-readable format. While low-quality at first, consumer digital video increased rapidly in quality, first with the introduction of playback standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (adopted for use in television transmission and DVD media), and then the introduction of the DV tape format allowing recording direct to digital data and simplifying the editing process, allowing non-linear editing systems to be deployed wholly on desktop computers.

Technical overview format:
Digital video cameras come in two different image capture formats: interlaced and progressive scan. Interlaced cameras record the image in alternating sets of lines: the odd-numbered lines are scanned, and then the even-numbered lines are scanned, then the odd-numbered lines are scanned again, and so on. One set of odd or even lines is referred to as a "field", and a consecutive pairing of two fields of opposite parity is called a frame.

A progressive scanning digital video camera records each frame as distinct, with both fields being identical. Thus, interlaced video captures twice as many fields per second as progressive video does when both operate at the same number of frames per second. This is one of the reasons video has a "hyper-real" look, because it draws a different image 60 times per second, as opposed to film, which records 24 or 25 progressive frames per second.

Digital video can be processed and edited on an NLE, or non-linear editing station, a device built exclusively to edit video and audio. These frequently can import from analog as well as digital sources, but are not intended to do anything other than edit videos. Digital video can also be edited on a personal computer which has the proper hardware and software. Using a NLE station, digital video can be manipulated to follow an order, or sequence, of video clips. Avid's software and hardware is almost synonymous with the professional NLE market, but Apple's Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and similar programs are also popular.

Many types of video compression exist for serving digital video over the internet, and onto DVDs. While DV video is not compressed beyond its own codec while editing, the file sizes that result are not practical for delivery onto optical discs or over the internet, with codecs such as the Windows Media format, MPEG2, MPEG4, Real Media, the more recent H.264, and the Sorenson media codec. Probably the most widely used formats for delivering video over the internet are MPEG4 and Windows Media, while MPEG2 is used almost exclusively for DVDs, providing an exceptional image in minimal size but resulting in a high level of CPU consumption to decompress.

As of 2007, the highest resolution demonstrated for digital video generation is 33 megapixels (7680 x 4320) at 60 frames per second ("UHDV"), though this has only been demonstrated in special laboratory settings. The highest speed is attained in industrial and scientific high speed cameras that are capable of filming 1024x1024 video at up to 1 million frames per second for brief periods of recording.