Tips for Smooth Panning

hi there,

long time no see?

your very own 'filmaker' is finally out of the darkness :-)

it's been long time since i posted anything. life has become very different during this time and i've been through many things. i finished my phd, stayed jobless for few months, then got a job in a software firm, moved from one place to another to another, etc. etc. anyways, it's a long story and not the topic of today's blog.

remember that i wrote in my last post that i will be making notes on the filmmaking as i learn new things along the road and post them here. though i didn't publish anything since my last entry, but i swear i learnt a lot of new exciting stuff, and my urge to become a filmmaker is growing day by day.

so back to the topic of 'making notes on filmmaking'. i don't know where to start? there are so many things i've been studying these days. but may be i won't be able to name all of them in one post. so for now, i will start with what i am learning right now. i am now reading about the "recommended panning speed".

sometimes you might have noticed the stuttering of images in the videos when panning especially when you pan fast. i've always wondered how to overcome this issue. frame rate and shutter speed/angle are the main issue i guess. ok, but what exactly is needed to avoid the pan 'strobes'? because the panning on the film certainly looks much smoother than it does on 24p video. my objective was to find if there exist some sort of 'rules of thumbs' in cinematography for making panning look smooth.

here is the summary of the guidelines, i found so far. a good read on this topic is this article.

1. prefer shallow depth of field as it smoothes the background and reduces the visible 'strobing'

2. low contrast situations are less vulnerable to 'pan strobes' than high-contrast, high detail situations. reducing the contrast of sharp verticals such as white doors on black walls helps reducing the judder in the panning.

3. panning along a centeral item in the picture, such as an actor, that the eye can lock onto would take the attention away from stuttering.

4. an old rule in the cinematography is, "the subject in the frame should either remain stationary or move slowly". a subject moving across the fame in less than 5-6 seconds will cause strobing.

5. on smaller screen, the judder is more prominent.

6. american cinematographer manual (edition 7, page 310, 311) gives a chart for 35mm camera recommended panning speeds for different framerates and focal lengths. (see below)

i found this chart very interesting. this chart is for 90 degree sweeps. for example a 90 degree sweep on 50mm should take 23 seconds. the time duration is much longer than i originally expected. i remember reading from somewhere that a pan should take about 5 seconds in between when something enters and leaves the frame, but this hint is not very useful because it does not deal with viewing angle. this chart is much more specific. once i get a 35mm camera or HD, i intend to check with these speeds which somehow look very slow to me. let's see later how these rules can be bent/broken :-P there are other issues with the shutter angles in film and HD cameras too, but i'll explore them later.

that's all i've for now. talk to you soon. i promise :-)