In video, a field is one of the many still images displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen.
Sometimes in interlaced video a field is called a frame which can lead to confusion.
Free-to-air analog TV was mostly broadcast as interlaced material because the trade-off of spatial resolution for frame rate reduced flickering on cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions.
High-definition digital television (see: HDTV) today can be broadcast terrestrially or distributed through cable systems in either interlaced (1080i) or progressive scan formats (720p or 1080p).
Selecting edit points on the wrong field can result in a "flash" at each edit point, and playing the video fields in reverse order creates a flickering image.