Covariances play a fundamental role in the theory of time series and they are critical quantities that are needed in both spectral and time domain analysis. Estimation of covariance matrices is needed in the construction of confidence regions for unknown parameters, hypothesis testing, principal component analysis, prediction, discriminant analysis among others. In this paper we consider both low-and high-dimensional covariance matrix estimation problems and present a review for asymptotic properties of sample covariances and covariance matrix estimates. In particular, we shall provide an asymptotic theory for estimates of high dimensional covariance matrices in time series, and a consistency result for covariance matrix estimates for estimated parameters.