With anime (which starts out at a lower frame rate anyway, typically 12fps), that's true. That's not the situation for which interlacing was invented, though. Interlacing was invented for live-action television, where the cameras take 60 samples per second (in order to reduce the flicker seen at low progressive refresh rates) and the signal only contains half the information from each one. It's not turning 30 into 60; it's turning 60 into 30, by throwing out half of each captured image. In a really real interlaced television signal, field 2 is not the second half of the same picture you saw in field 1; it is the second half of a picture that comes 1/60th of a second after the picture you saw half of in field 1. The pictures change with every field, and you only get to see half of each one.the Black Monarch wrote:Dude... turning 30 frames per second into 60 half-frames per second is NOT compression. Nothing is being compressed. Nothing is smaller after interlacing than before. The same amount of data is being used to describe the picture.
That could be legitimately described as a primitive form of lossy compression, although to do so is pretty misleading in the AMV context because it makes it sound like the "interlacing" we might do on a computer (which involves re-ordering the data without throwing any out) somehow reduces the amount of data sent. When we deal with anime, there are far fewer than 60 picture updates per second, so we see each one in several fields, and interlacing doesn't throw out any data.