could you guys tell me where i can find a comprehensive explanation of compression, colour space and how compression affects lattitude

That would be really appreciated
thanks Henry

go to www.pixelmonger.com

A guy named Scott Billups wrote a book called Digital Moviemaking (2ond Edition). Best video book I ever read to turn me from a dv novice into a HD professional (academically anyway).

Actually, best film industry book I ever read.

Good Stuff.

Henry yr questions are not covered in two words... But just in short: (video)compession doesn't affect lattitude. Color spaces tell us how displays, scanners,... behave (which colors) w.r.t. applied signals. These are the so called device dependant color spaces...big chaos! Absolute color spaces (CIELAB...) are the only real predictable ones. There is a movement towards better color space definitions (sRGB) for all devices. Crompression involves a bunch of tools which are used for ending up with images with a lower amount of bits per image. The tools are based on leaving out components in the signal which are not seen by the human eye, or starting from another way to represent pics (tranform coding..DCT) and/or smart tricks on bit interpretations (run length encoding...)