Keyframe

n. A moment that felt innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life--a chance meeting you'd think back on for years, a harmless comment that sparked an ongoing feud, an idle musing that would come to define your entire career--a monumental shift secretly buried among the tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next. In video compression, a key frame defines major changes in a scene. Most frames in compressed video are in-betweens, marking subtle incremental changes, but key frames depict a whole new scene. This technique allows you to move forward without stopping to buffer, even if it makes it harder to rewind.