AV Artifact Atlas



Welcome to AV Artifact Atlas, a resource for identifying errors and anomalies in analog and digital video. AVAA is built for and by a community of professionals in the field of audiovisual archiving but useful for anyone working with av material. Check out our About page for more information about the project and the Contributor’s Guide for steps on how you can participate.

To start, you can view this list of commonly occurring audio and video artifacts.

You can browse the site using the search box in the sidebar, the tag cloud below, or this list of artifacts.

2-inch Quad Abrasion Analog Audio Azimuth Baking Balanced Cables Banding Betamax Black Levels Cable Cassette Chrominance Cleaning Clicks Clipping Color Color lock Color smearing Comet Tails Common Artifacts Curvature error DV DV25 Deck Failure Deformation Device Error Digital Digital Clicks Digitization Dirt Disc Playback Discrete Cosine Transform Dot Crawl Dropout Dying Batteries Edge curl Editing cut Electrical Error Expansion Extended Play Film Flange pack Flicker Frequency Loss Ghosting Gouging Head Clog Hue Hum Interference LP Levels Levels Too Hot Long Play Luminance Luminance Blooming MPEG Magnetic Tape Magnetostrictive Action Media Damage Media Failure Mono Noise Open Reel Tape Operator Error Overs Oxide Out PAL Phase Pitch Playback Adjustment Popped strand Post-echo Power Supply Pre-echo Processing Artifact Production Error Pulse Quilting RF Rewinding Servo Shrinkage Skew Smearing Speed Fluctuation Spoking Station Qualification Step pack Stereo Strobing Sub-sampling Synchronization System Failure Tape Error Time Base Corrector Tracking Error Transfer Artifact U-matic Undersaturation Video Warble Waveform Windowing Y/C Delay Error deterioration flutter lubrication sticky