Field

In video, a field is one of the many still images that are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame.

When the fields are displayed on a non-progressive-scan video monitor they are "interlaced" so that the content of one field is displayed on all of the odd-numbered lines on the screen and the other field is used on the even lines. Analog TV was primarily broadcast as interlaced material. In contrast, progressive-scan video captures full-frame images for each frame. High-definition digital television can be broadcast terrestrially or distributed through cable systems in either interlaced (1080i) or progressive scan formats (720p or 1080p).

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_field.