''This digital process begins with a camera and a microphone that captures the images and sounds of a video clip and send those analog signals (that exist as waves) to a video-capture adapter board. There is an analog-to-digital converter chip on this video-capture adapter card, which converts these analog signals into digital patterns (1's and 0's) and a compression/decompression chip (or software) reduces the amount of data needed to recreate the video and audio signals:''

http://www.asnr.org/elc_2004/Wiggins...

''Comparing analog to digital in this sense is similar to comparing a typewriter to Microsoft Word. The current level of technology allows the user to use features like cut/copy/paste of the clipboard in editing digital video clips. There are many special features previously available to only large production studios that can now be available on a small digital camera''

And IMO Avid knows it.

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