SMOOTH MOTION IN FILM INDUSTRY ALTHOUGH SHOOTING IN 24P......

Question

Hello guys!
      I always had a general question about film making...
How professional Hollywood films can shoot their footages with such a smoth motion (without any jitters, strobing, blury e.t.c. artifacts) although they are shooting in 24p. 24p is not good especially when we have to deal with panning shots. Interlaced footage is much better in terms of smooth motion. Yet the films are perfect!! So the question is how they can achieve better and smoother motion although they shoot in progressive than in interlaced.
Thanks.

Answer 1

How professional Hollywood films can shoot their footages with such a smoth motion (without any jitters, strobing, blury e.t.c. artifacts) although they are shooting in 24p. 24p is not good especially when we have to deal with panning shots. Interlaced footage is much better in terms of smooth motion. Yet the films are perfect!! So the question is how they can achieve better and smoother motion although they shoot in progressive than in interlaced.
To answer your question directly, there are a couple of things that Hollywood does that you don't normally see when shooting on a smaller crew, smaller budget, etc...
For one, you need to achieve the much discussed shallow depth of field (DOF) over/above what a typical 24p video camera can do. This is a balance of lens focal distance and image sensor size. An old fashioned 35mm film camera has a "sensor" that is many times larger than an HD video sensor. The focal distance of the lenses is also generally a good big larger. Therefore, shallow DOF.
You also need to frame the shot and move the frame just like in Hollywood. Even when you're looking at a large panoramic vista shot, you'll notice that the image pans only very slightly, and many times the subject/foreground remains relatively stationary. This reduces stuttering substantially, to the point it's almost unnoticable (though you WILL notice it if you are actively looking for it). For tighter shots in motion (say, a full-body profile shot of the subject walking across a room), you're going to be panning or trucking at a speed that will cause strobing in the shot more than likely, and this only mitigated by keeping the subject spatially stationary in the frame throughout the move.
Another technique has to do with lighting, combined with the two previous techniques. If the relative luminosity of the foreground/subject is substantially greater than the background or other elements in the frame, the strobing is less noticeable on those secondary elements. Your eye becomes more focused on the foreground brighter objects - similar to the way DOF affects your perception - and so you just don't really notice that dark, strobing background so much.
The 24p strobing effect has very little to do with processing at all. However, converting between frame rates and formats CAN sometimes exacerbate all manner of video artifacts, including strobing in the shot. It's not the usual culprit though.
So hopefully you learned a new word today - TECHNIQUE - and you better understand that it's not as much Hollywood's technology that aids the quality of their product, as it is the TECHNIQUE involved in the production. That should be good news of course....technique can be learned, whereas much everything else about Hollywood's production aesthetic comes with an enormous price tag that most independent producers cannot afford.