Technobabble

Plug-In Electric Cars Just Around the Corner

Posted by on Jun 17, 2008 | 4 Comments

Ready or not, the dawn of the electric car era is in sight.

Electric car fanatics gathered at the Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008 conference last week in Washington DC. The event, hosted by the Brookings Institute and Google.org, packed the main ballroom of the Washington Hyatt on Capitol Hill.

A standing room only crowd heard words of encouragement and got a stiff dose of reality from distinguished members of Congress, industry leaders, and visionaries.

The electric car is going to happen. And it’s going to happen sooner than you might think.

Conference video:

  • D Lowrey

    I seem to remember reading something years ago that if the only thing you’re using your TV is for watching DVD’s (not Blu-ray) and over-the-air signals…720p/1080i is the highest you need. The reason is most/all DVD’s are 720X480 and no broadcaster is sending out a signal which is higher than 1080i anyway.

    • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/6G3ZZJCHOLYP3S5CRCIHQ7WDSE MVIM

      Also keep in mind that DVD is anamorphic widescreen. Thus, the frame is actually 640×480 with a vertically stretched version of the image, which is stretched back to 720×480 during output. See “anamorphic widescreen” in Wikipedia for details.

  • http://twitter.com/mrcnwmn Marc Newman

    Interlaced video is NOT an artifact of old hardware. The specification was designed to handle a specific problem that you will see with progressive footage. Interlaced video compensates for this issue a bit, but adds it’s own artifact (as you mention).

    At 30fps (29.97fps) takes ~.03 seconds for each frame to draw, and the bottom part of the image is drawn (captured) before the top portion of the image. This means that when something (eg. a vertical pole) moves horizontally across the screen – progressive footage will cause it (the vertical pole) to appear to lean quite a bit.

    30fps frame-rate footage, using interlaced will reduce this artifact by half. The scan will go from bottom to top in 1/2 the time (~.015 second) of the progressive frame, and then repeat the process again to fill the lines between (odd/even frames). You should only notice the jagged lines when the frame is paused, or when the video is converted to progressive.

    Of course, the story doesn’t end there.

    The next piece of information is that modern cameras/televisions are faster, having 60fps. So, keeping the same leaning artifact we had at 30fps with interlaced can now be done without using interlaced. We can use progressive, and have limited leaning artifacts with 60fps, but the leaning artifact still does exist! So, what happens if we continue to use interlaced? Well, the leaning artifact is diminished even more, as each pass of the scan-line takes 1/2 (~.008) of what we’ve been used to all the years before HD.

    So, which is better when buying a television: It doesn’t matter. It’s about how the video was captured. Progressive footage converted to interlaced video looks exactly the same as it would if the television was progressive. The difference is how it’s drawn, and quite frankly – interlaced is going to look smoother.

    As far as buying a camera? Progressive video cameras are is nice for getting screen shots out of the footage, and as long as you’re not doing green screen – it probably doesn’t matter in any way. If you think you need 1080p – I’d think about colorspace (4:0:0 vs. 4:2:0 vs. 4:4:4) before worrying about interlaced vs. progressive.

  • glenn tan

    never seen how 1080i looks when there is motion but i would stick with 720p to be safe