In the field of professional

broadcasting Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum (radio waves), in a one-to-many model. Broadcasting began wi ...

, an end-to-end

workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence o ...

(from

ingest Ingestion is the consumption of a substance by an organism. In animals, it normally is accomplished by taking in a substance through the mouth into the gastrointestinal tract, such as through eating or drinking. In single-celled organisms ingesti ...

to playout) is called ''tapeless'' when part, or all of it, is made without any use of audio

tape recorder An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...

s or videotape machines; video and audio sources being ingested, recorded, edited and played out entirely on

digital video Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data Digital data, in information theory and information systems, is information represented as a string of discrete symbols eac ...

systems. Digital tapeless recording refers to any recording method using

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals ** Digital camera, which captures and stores digital ...

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

recorded to a medium other than audio/videotape (usually

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...

, CD-style or

flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use ...

). It is popular in sound recording circles using computers or specialized workstations, and has something of a following among video users as well (in particular, among both low-end

camcorder A camcorder is a self-contained portable electronic device with video and recording as its primary function. It is typically equipped with an articulating screen mounted on the left side, a belt to facilitate holding on the right side, hot-sw ...

users who want the ultimate in light, silent equipment, and among high-end video and film producers doing

high-definition video High-definition video (HD video) is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for ''high-definition'', generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical scan lines ...

at such a high bitrate that tape simply cannot keep up. It is also common on mid-to-high end portable voice recorders, which record to formats such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

ATRAC Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to h ...

. In the 30 years from the mid-1980s to 2015, tapeless production has moved from being an expensive high-end niche application to being the default workflow for professional production. The availability of low cost disk and high-powered CPUs and GPUs in modern computers has also made it affordable for even amateur productions, and often cheaper than solutions using professional tape formats. It is generally believed that digital tapeless recording is the most robust and easy-to-manage solution for audio and video production. Nevertheless, particularly within the audio world, there has been significant demand for returning to all- analog, even vintage, recording equipment, to achieve a softer, "warmer" sound at the expense of precise sound replication. This has not so much been the case with video production, as vintage equipment is often inoperable or unable to work with current technology, and generally lacks the quality achieved by digital video technology.

External links

Illustrated article on the basics of digital recording and playout for broadcasting.
Broadcast engineering Video Digital audio recording {{Sound-tech-stub

See also

External links