Motion Blur

What this is about

Cinema's low frame rate survives on blur: each frame's smear bridges the gap to the next, so 24 discrete images read as continuous motion. Too little blur — from a narrow shutter or from strobing LED sources — makes pans stutter and action look like a video game. Too much dissolves detail. Camera crews manage it with shutter angle; VFX teams recreate it on rendered elements, because a perfectly sharp CG object inside a blurred plate betrays itself instantly. Fast pans get tested against blur, which is why pan-speed tables exist.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Blur is per frame, not between frames — it lives inside each exposure.
• Judder on fast pans at 24 fps is a cadence limit; slowing the pan helps more than any setting.
• Strobed or flicker-free-dimmed light sources can strip blur from motion and make it look stepped.

With TillyGen

In the production plan fast camera moves at 24 fps carry a pan-speed note, so judder is caught in the shot design rather than in the edit.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.