EDIT: you can probaly just read Spot's answer. Also a bit of Googling turned up that the idea of "persistence of vision" being responsible for why we don't see flickering images has been discredited.
http://www.grand-illusions.com/percept.htm



Film does use progressive, but progressive is not really a film term at all.

Films are viewed on television after being converted to video usually to interlaced video. The process is called telecine.

Progressive is new technology. The vast majority of TVs out there are not progressive scan TVs. This is why is not used all the time. Most people can't view it.

When TV was invented they could not trasmit enough information to show a full 30 frames a second. ( I don't even know if 30 was settled on yet.) So they came with the solution of showing half of each frame in quick succession. This was enough to fool the human eye that they saw a whole image. Also the fields are not just top half of the frame followed by the bottom half, our eyes would probably pick that up. One frame shows all the odd-numbered lines and one shows all the even. The neurological phenemon known as persistance of vision is why it integrates into a whole frame. It's only recently that electronics could do progressive especially for video.

Computer screens have always been progressive, it's just the way they were made.

wow....i officially learned some stuff today! Thanks. Recap of what I learned:

interlace (right now) is sharper and better for fast motion shots

video should be rendered in interlace mode when it is intended to be viewed on TV

switch project field order to progressive when you want to take a snap shot :)

PS: I render an AVI clip from my camcorder as progressive mpeg but when i click on it once in the explorer section of vegas it identifies the file as interlace...why is that?

and another random question.....vegas doesn't have the ability to save as a animated gif?

>>interlace (right now) is sharper and better for fast motion shots<<

Only if the overall refresh rate is higher... for example, 1080/60p would be sharper and better than 1080/60i for all shots. But 1080/60i is going to be clearer/sharper on motion than 1080/24p or 1080/30p. The difference isn't really due to interlacing, it's due to the display update rate. Interlacing is a way to update the display twice as fast as would otherwise be possible.

So 1080/60p would be superior in all ways to 1080/60i, but... 1080/60p isn't a reality yet. 720/60p is, however, there is no interlaced 720 mode. So you can compare 720/60p against 1080/60i, but then the pixel resolutions aren't the same.

So to truly be able to compare, you could do so in standard-def, where you could compare 480/60p against 480/60i. 480/60p is superior in every conceivable way to 480/60i -- twice the data, higher resolution, better motion rendition, easier to extract still frames, no "interlace" artifacts on paused footage, no stairstep/aliasing, no flicker on thin lines... progressive is a superior technology to interlace. We just have to be able to compare actual apples to actual apples, and at HD resolutions it's not possible right now.

There is little point in even bringing 60p to this discussion, because as pointed out earlier, it's not deliverable right now, and not aquirable at any level that members of this forum would have access to.
Progressive as it stands, is not a superior technology to interlaced, not with today's systems.
Transporter beams are an infinitely superior format of travel, but since it's not part of today's technology, why confuse a discussion of jet travel with tranporter beams?
Someday, we'll see progressive as the standard, as I'd commented earlier. Probably in my lifetime, but maybe not. The ATSC won't even revisit the issue for another 7 years.
720p as a DELIVERY vehicle could potentially be argued as being superior to 1080i due to the greater mathematical horizontal resolution, but as you say, it's not apples to apples.
Then again...the_learninator wasn't asking about HD vs SD, so I should apologize for somewhat taking it in that direction. Since we've been so focused on HD for the past year, it's like I keep forgetting that SD even exists. That's not a good thing. :-)

Well I gotta disagree (for once) with DSE. 60p is within the capabilities of anyone using Vegas. Not everything has to start out shot on a video camera. There's nothing stopping you taking stop frame animations with a still camera and creating 60p, even in HiDef if you like.
If you've got a Z1 I'd suspect you could use that to acquire SD 60p also, shoot 60i HD, convert fields to frames and downsample to SD. Job done.
And just to really push the envelope my next project involves acquiring footage at upto 500p (no that wasn't a type, thats 500fps). Now the camera is going to need one hell of a lot of light and we'll be recording straight to hard disk arrays using SCSI / fibre from the camera to the drives. I'm hoping to get some really good 'real' bullet time footage although that's not the primary purpose for the camera. If only I can figure out how to get the camera to pan and zoom fast enough to track a projectile down the range :)
Bob.

Point is, deinterlacing 60i to 60p isn't the same as acquiring in 60p which is currently limited to extremely high end cameras with extremely fast off board recording gear.
Yes, anyone can deinterlace 60i media, but it's not the same as acquiring 60p. A lot of confusion arises between delivery and acquisition. The quality of progressive is awesome when it's 1080/60p. The quality of deinterlacing 60i is really only 30p. But to ACQUIRE 60p, now that's a huge feat. To BROADCAST 1080/60p also isn't practical nor really possible right now. It's not part of the world spec. To acquire it currently requires dual HD/SDI stream output. The Thomson LDK 6200 does 1080/60p, but only in slow mo, and records to a dual gigabyte networked array. Sony is apparently working their SRW-1 dual stream recorder to work towards the 1080/60p recording.
With 1080p, you get the beauty of flawless, full frames, with the benefit of being able to smoothly capture high motion and not give viewers eyestrain or headache.
But you're right, I'm too focused on the camera side of things in this discussion, and after really re-reading your post, animations, stills, etc are all possible at 1080/60p, and in fact, when Sony started showing HD for Vegas 4, they were showing 60p animations with the proxy streams. I'd forgotten that til you brought it up.
Kinda funny how a post from Barry gets me focused on one thing, a post from you gets me focused on another. I'm just fickle in the wind...:-)
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I hope we didn't confuse the_learninator!

Well,
just to confuse the poor learninator check this out:
http://www.visiblesolutions.com/phantomv9.html
I've looked at some of the footage from these babies and well I guess you could called it 'coloured' and the acquisition system is not all that portable but then again nor is the backpack that goes with a Viper.
You're right we get very focussed on the usual acquistion and delivery systems but there's a whole other world of video out there that actually has very real uses and ones that solve problems that benefit all of us.
Just to give an example, if I can deliver the goods on this camera system the client thinks he can solve an airflow problem in the design of their packaging system meaning the plant can be run 4 times faster.
Another system I was helping someone with required two cameras for stereo imaging but it needed both shutters run is exact sync so that precise position co-ordinates could be derived from a persons motion.
Now the great thing is I'll be recommending Vegas to anyone using these oddball systems, none of these engineers have any experience editing so Vegas's intuitive approach is ideal for them.
Bob.