Digital Video for the Desktop

	1
A briefhistory

A definitive moment in the history of the moving image was the discovery, in 1824, by the Englishman Peter Roget that, if a series of drawings of an object were made, with each one showing the object in a slightly different position, and then the drawings were viewed in rapid succession, the illusion of a moving object was created. Roget had discovered what we now call ‘the persistence of vision’, the property whereby the brain retains the image of an object for a finite time even after the object has been removed from the field of vision. Experimentation showed that, for the average person, this time is about a quarter of a second, therefore if the eye is presented with more than four images per second, the successive ...