Input Processing
Hive's execution engine (referred to as just engine henceforth) first uses the configured InputFormat to read in a record of data (the value object returned by the RecordReader of the InputFormat).
The engine then invokes Serde.deserialize() to perform deserialization of the record. There is no real binding that the deserialized object returned by this method indeed be a fully deserialized one.
The engine also gets hold of the ObjectInspector to use by invoking Serde.getObjectInspector(). This has to be a subclass of structObjectInspector since a record representing a row of input data is essentially a struct type.
The engine passes the deserialized object and the object inspector to all operators for their use in order to get the needed data from the record. The object inspector knows how to construct individual fields out of a deserialized record. For example, StructObjectInspector has a method called getStructFieldData() which returns a certain field in the record. This is the mechanism to access individual fields.
Output Processing
Output is analogous to input. The engine passes the deserialized Object representing a record and the corresponding ObjectInspector to Serde.serialize(). In this context serialization means converting the record object to an object of the type expected by the OutputFormat which will be used to perform the write. To perform this conversion, the serialize() method can make use of the passed ObjectInspector to get the individual fields in the record in order to convert the record to the appropriate type.
