The Joy of Interlacing from Videopia on Vimeo.

As it happens, interlacing is not a diabolical technology invented just to make your life miserable by creating those annoying Venetian Blind patterns on digital videos. (Who knew?)

The wonderful people of Videopia don’t just explain interlacing – they defend it, starting with its early history. Then they explain how to deal with removing interlacing in the progressive-scan world of Internet distribution. And if you’re still not clear on when that horizontal pattern of lines on your video is a good thing and when it’s a bad thing, this will make it clear.

It’s by far the single best explanation I’ve seen, and they’ve done it all with fantastic production values.

Now if people will just watch the darned thing, maybe we won’t see all this poor deinterlacing in online videos on YouTube. (Stats were surprisingly low when this came online, so have at it, Visualist Nation, and spread the love around!)

Any further tips (or questions) to add to their interlacing advice, ye tech-savvy visualists? Let us know in comments.

Lots more smart advice at Videopia. Via Jamie Wilkinson’s FriendFeed

Updated: Richard Lainhart writes with a still-better technique. I agree, absolutely - got so distracted by the elegant explanation of interlacing itself and its history that I neglected to pay as much attention to what they were actually suggesting! Of course, this won’t work in all cases, meaning you’re back to the video technique. But since a lot of you have cameras capable of shooting as Richard describes, this could be helpful.

The deinterlacing techniques mentioned in the video all will introduce artifacts of some sort in the image. If you use leave the fields in, you’ll still see interlace combing on the edges of objects in motion, even if the frame isn’t paused. Interpolated interlacing can be better, but you’ll still often see blockiness, sawtooth effects, or other such artifacting on straight lines and hard-edged objects, as no interpolation method is perfect.

If you can, you’ll get better results with this method - shoot everything in full 1080i HDV, and reduce the frame to one-half resolution in After Effects. When you bring the HDV footage into AE, convert it to square pixels but tell AE to not deinterlace it (in the Interpret Footage dialog.) Then scale that image to half-size in a 960×540 comp. This has the effect of throwing out every other field and reducing the frame to widescreen SD format, and you’ll get perfect, clear progressive full frames. From there, crop to 4:3 for standard SD, or scale up to 1280×720 for 720P HD - scaling the image up in AE will introduce some softness, but it will still look better than 720i footage when viewed on a computer screen.

All the footage on my YouTube site was processed this way, and none of it has any visible field artifacting.

http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart

No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.

Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:

Make Your YouTube More Livable: I Have a Fast Connection Setting

Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:

One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over recent months is the rich communities on Flickr and Vimeo — Flickr for stills, Vimeo for videos. Each of those, incidentally, has very active groups around free visual tools vvvv (for Windows) and Processing (for everything). Unlike "big bucket" sites like YouTube, Vimeo in particular has had some really terrific niche crowds of people.

Of course, now Flickr has gone and added video. I don’t see this becoming anyone’s primary video uploading site, given a more restricted feature set, the mixture of videos and photos, and the 90-second length cap. But as a supplement to, say, Vimeo, it’s interesting — especially given the number of times I’ve wound up in someone’s photoset staring at a still image and wondering what the thing looks like in motion.

Personally, I could easily see doing long-form or "feature" videos on Vimeo and adding photos to Flickr where it makes sense in my photostream — it’s all about context for me, rather than dumping lots of random stuff everywhere.

How do you feel about Flickr video? Are you using it? Are you staying away from it? Any first impressions? Videos you’ve got I’m you’d like to share with the CDMotion community?

Don’t forget the CDMotion Flickr Group; we’ll be watching for videos there.

At top: one the first people in my contact list to use Flickr Video is interactive artist ("slash" many other things) Jaki Levy, who is doing HD video for Ralph Lauren’s flagship store here in New York — see his blog.

Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.

Wait.

Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.

Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)

It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.

Visualists have a wide range of skills to cover. After you’re done figuring out how to create and edit content and turn it into a performance / live installation / whatever, then you have to deal with the technicalities of projectors?

Basic calculations for throw distances are pretty straightforward: a 3:1 throw ratio, for instance, means you need 3′ from the projection surface to get a 1′ image. But that’s before you throw in all the variables: what are the specs of the projector you’re using, what’s the lens, what’s the setting of the lens, what size image and throw will provide an image that’s bright enough for the job, etc. So, while there are various calculators online, by far, my favorite is this fantastic interactive calculator at Projector Central:

Projection Calculator Pro [Projector Central]

Video artist Maya Ciarrocchi turned me on to the site (thanks, Maya)! It’s useful for two reasons, even if you’re decent at arithmetic. First, it’s got an extensive database of obscure projectors attached to it, so you’ll prepared for whatever you run into. Second, it has adjustable sliders so you can try what-if scenarios.

Won’t be long before I put all of this to use. Wednesday, I leave for Pittsburgh and the Hazlett Theater, where I’ll be in residence for a week and a half installing a custom show for choreographer Grisha Coleman, written in Processing and Java. I expect this will be a trial-by-fire for me as far as projector setup and installation, with one computer display and five projectors, all in unusual locations. I’ll be sure to report back on what I learn, including what I learn the hard way.

How about you: got a preferred method for researching projectors and projector setup? Got some killer spreadsheet for your throw distances? Let us know in comments.