Overview: Interlacing and cadence

Interlacing and cadence describe how fields or repeated pictures carry motion from capture to presentation.

A field can represent a different instant from the field beside it. A telecined sequence can instead contain a pattern derived from another original frame cadence. The operation that reconstructs progressive pictures depends on which structure is present: field order, deinterlacing and inverse telecine answer different parts of that reconstruction.

• Progressive video
  Progressive video represents each picture as a complete frame rather than fields from successive capture times.

• Interlaced video
  Interlaced video records alternating sets of picture lines as fields captured at successive times.

• Field order
  Field order identifies which set of alternating picture lines comes first in time.

• Telecine and 3:2 pulldown
  3:2 pulldown distributes film pictures over alternating two-field and three-field intervals for television presentation.

• Inverse telecine
  Inverse telecine reconstructs progressive film pictures from a telecined television cadence.

• Deinterlacing
  Deinterlacing reconstructs complete display pictures from an interlaced video's alternating fields.