What is the difference between "interlaced" and "progressive" video?
In the last couple of years, camcorders have added a feature called "progressive," or in some instances, it's called "frame mode." It's essentially the same thing. It's an offset to what's called "interlaced." Camcorders and television have been interlaced since day one. It means that you have a frame of information which is like this, and those frames are two fields of information, two lines of information. If we go back in the early days of television, really what happened was in TV sets, the actual screens weren't really fast enough to produce an entire frame of information, so they broke it up into two fields, so it would, again, write fields one, then three, then four, then five and they could fill it in. What happened was the sets, the phosphorus would go out before it would fill up the entire screen. So they figured the best way to get the information to the screen was to bring it in in two different pieces.And that worked well for years, but really, ideally, we want all of that information, just like film, to be a solid frame. So sets are better now, computers are better now; we can handle an entire frame of information. We can move on to a frame mode, or a progressive mode, depending on the camera you own, to get an entire frame of information recorded at a single time. Really important, especially if you're looking for either the film look, or really are going to actually do a film transfer and end up in film, you really want to shoot progressive that way, or detail on progressive.Now, there's not really a compromise to progressive, but the equipment that you're using has to handle progressive as well. Televisions, for the most part, are still interlaced. So you have to consider that all the way across the board.
