[Frameworks] The Digital Video Exhibition Problem: And An Offer To Address It

[David Tetzlaff]

On Dec 5, 2010, at 6:09 PM, Aaron F. Ross wrote:

> I'm just really down on the whole "dump the files in a playlist and 
> let it roll" method of exhibition. My main objection is that, even 
> today, computers don't have much elegance in the way they handle a 
> discrepancy between source frame rate and display scan rate. In other 
> words, if the media is encoded at 23.976 fps, and the desktop is 
> displaying frames at 60 Hz, you're likely to see horrible horizontal 
> tearing in the middle of the frame, or blurry frame blending.

Modern computers can indeed do better than this if they are set up properly. It's just not easy. The hardware isn't that expensive, either. Making the right choices in hardware, software, settings etc. is the hard part. But, eventually, the potential flexibility of computers will allow playlists made up of different kinds of source files to let 'em roll more or less seamlessly and in proper quality. We're not there yet. Thus, as I've said, at this point, no exhibition venue should be relying on a single format.