frame of video

A video can be seen as comprising a series of still images called frames. In celloloid filmography, these were literally separate transparencies on the film reel, but now are stored digitally and often compressed so that each still frame has to be decoded from the file format. If you view a single frame it can often look blurred or indistinct, but our eyes interpret the moving image so that the quality when played may be better than each still on their own – compression algorithms exploit these visual properties to enable higher compression without loss of perceived quality.