Digital video is a field in which huge industry and government programmes are aiming at building a coherent framework for the coding, comprehension, storage, networking and deliverability of video programmes. Video libraries and archives follow this trend with great interest and try to build pilot projects of digital video libraries, but economical and technical constraints have yet prevented most organizations from building fully operational digital systems. This article emphasizes another face of digital video; the ability to use digital processing of video documents for the indexing, retrieval and access to video documents.