What Wrong With Digital
by Dr. D.

The first mystery to me is why they still cling to interlaced formats when digital is naturally a progressive or contiguous means of storage and playback.

For some strange reason they made 1080 interlaced, despite the fact that Blu-Ray and HDDVD is going to be progressive and the 720 HD is progressive.

Progressive, you see, is drawing all lines from top to bottom in a single pass over 1/30th of a second while interlaced draws the even lines top to bottom in 1/60th of a second then goes back and draws the odd lines in 1/60th of a second. The resulting images, especially of a moving object, is that you get a jagged edge. With progressive you get a uniformed edge that slants as the scan continues.

The next mystery is why HD camcorders aren’t coming with HDMI interfaces, which is supposedly the de-factor standard for American HD.

Speaking of HD why do some TV makers and most home camcorder makers support less than the 2 megapixel standard for HD. Some LCD TV sets which claim to be HD and most home HD camcorders weigh in at about 1.3 to 1.7 megapixels, which is below the 16:9 matrix of HD on the high end and theatrical digital movies.

Then we have to wonder, with Microsoft offering Movie Maker and all camcorders using tapes set up for FireWire, why the FireWire connection isn’t on all computers, right along with the USB. You only need one or two FireWire, but virtually every out of the box consumer computer using Windows doesn’t come with this connection and as such the home user who wants to edit video has to buy and add a card to support the camera connection. Apple invented it and has been offering it for the last 4 years now on every machine.

As for importing and editing, why do hard drive camcorder makers save their files under of the MOD extension that is not supported by most software when they could save it as an MPG extension which is supported by some software.

Finally why aren’t more software makers supporting VOB imports for editing DVD disks. It is because of copyrights on commercial DVDs or what? Many people like the DVD concept, but find it almost impossible to edit a home movie made on a DVD disk.