In any modern media production environment, you will almost certainly come across many different types of video formats. How these formats differ from one another is often based on the way the video signal is compressed in order to make it play back smoothly on a computer or other device. A codec is the key to deciphering each video format in order to achieve this.

Most codecs and their proprietary derivatives are created with only acquisition and delivery in mind, and achieve their efficiency by removing quite large chunks of temporal and color information. Also, for the most part, they are designed to run on a dedicated chip, not a computer, which means that they often take considerably more power to compress, than to decompress, making editing these codecs a heavy load for most computers.