| "This is why nobody will allow you to wear stripes on television:" This used to be cardinal rule in television broadcasting but it's much less a problem nowadays with the increased resolution/line rate of HD TV and video processing (filters) designed to eliminate it. Nevertheless, whilst once discouraged, moiré was often a useful tool as camera and CCU (Camera Control Unit) operators would use it to focus an image—the more pronounced the moiré the sharper the camera's focus. As bad as moiré is perceived a much greater cardinal 'sin' in both television broadcasting and photography is lateral inversion. This is where the image has been swapped in the horizontal direction (in some places it was a dismissible offence), as it's a complete distortion/misrepresentation of the image, which in some instances, may go undiscovered—there being no visual clues to indicate the problem. Lateral inversion is very obvious when writing, street signs etc., appear backwards but for some reason it's very much less so when images of humans are involved. Despite the fact that laterally-inverted images put men's clothes on women and vice versa—as blouses, shitrts, coats and pants flies appear the wrong way around—few people seem to notice. There's much evidence for this, one I often cite is that there are images from WWII on the US National Archive by the US Army Signal Corps that are still laterally inverted after 70-plus years that no one has bothered to correct (it's not a recent scanning error either as the Signal Corps logo (which is embedded within the photo) is not laterally inverted but the image content is). BTW, laterally inverting a film image reduces the resolution as the negative or slide is no longer in the normal focus plane. |