  (abridged) In this paper we describe in detail the reduction, preparation and
reliability of the photometric catalogues which comprise the 1.2 deg^2
CFH12K-VIRMOS deep field. The survey reaches a limiting magnitude of BAB~26.5,
VAB~26.2, RAB~25.9 IAB~25.0 and contains 90,729 extended sources in the
magnitude range 18.0<IAB<24.0. We demonstrate our catalogues are free from
systematic biases and are complete and reliable down these limits. We estimate
that the upper limit on bin-to-bin systematic photometric errors for the I-
limited sample is ~10% in this magnitude range. We estimate that 68% of the
catalogues sources have absolute per co-ordinate astrometric uncertainties less
than ~0.38" and ~0.32" (alpha,delta). Our internal (filter-to-filter) per
co-ordinate astrometric uncertainties are 0.08" and 0.08" (alpha,delta). We
quantify the completeness of our survey in the joint space defined by object
total magnitude and peak surface brightness. Finally, we present numerous
comparisons between our catalogues and published literature data: galaxy and
star counts, galaxy and stellar colours, and the clustering of both point-like
and extended populations. In all cases our measurements are in excellent
agreement with literature data to IAB<24.0. This combination of depth and areal
coverage makes this multi-colour catalogue a solid foundation to select
galaxies for follow-up spectroscopy with VIMOS on the ESO-VLT and a unique
database to study the formation and evolution of the faint galaxy population to
z~1 and beyond.
