Did anyone notice how jerky the camera movements were on this show? I didn't watch it long because I was surfing, but I couldn't help but notice how unsmooth the camera panned.

Greg better stop making those jerky movements or else he'll go blind. :D

Well if your talking about Grey's Anatomy on ABC, the jerky camera work is probably intentional. They do a lot of handheld camera work on that show. You'll find this technique heavily employed on NCIs and 24 as well. They like the frenetic feel.

I thought it was my DVR! Good to know it wasn't. It was not jerky movements from camera shots. Kinda looked like my DVR had problems deinterlacing. But it only happened on a small portion of the show.

Well if your talking about Grey's Anatomy on ABC, the jerky camera work is probably intentional. They do a lot of handheld camera work on that show. You'll find this technique heavily employed on NCIs and 24 as well. They like the frenetic feel.

I've seen something similar to what the topic creator described, and it's not the "handheld" style. What I've seen would start off as a smooth pan and then jump, or jerk. I've always written it off as a local issue, though it can be quite annoying. I've noticed it on Lost as well, and on both shows it only occurs during a pan. It's not part of the show because the DVDs, at least for Lost, do not have the same type of jerkiness.

I could have swore I saw minor jerking on Desparite Housewifes yesterday. This only happens on ABC. I'm watching it via QAM with charter cable.

I can say that the jerky motion on Pan's is sometimes the local stations ABC HD satellite Reciever. Watch the crawl on GMA HD in the AM and it should be smooth. If not then this is the issue. I call it the Boston Shuffle. I have seen this on Boston Legal numerious times and it can be resolved by power cycling the satellite receiver. We just switch to the second receiver and reboot the other one in the AM.

This is the first time I have seen anyone outside of Dallas bring this up.
JStigler

I have noticed this happening a great deal lately. It has become extremely annoying. I was watching Castle tonight and the jerkiness was ridiculous.

I was suspecting that ABC was removing frames to shorten programs to squeeze in more commercial time.

I suppose it could be HDTV related as the local affiliate (WLS) has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no idea what it is doing when it comes to broadcasting HDTV. I have only noticed this on ABC shows.

ABC does time-compress all their scripted primetime shows through the use of frame blending. This is easily shown by comparing the broadcasts on ABC to those on Canadian networks like CTV, where the Canadian broadcast ends up being 30-60 seconds longer once commercials are removed, even though no content apparently missing. Castle tends to be one of the worse since it airs after Dancing With the Stars, which always runs over its allotted time. Most people don't notice the issue when watching at 60Hz because so many of the frames are duplicates anyway, but it's really nasty when trying to convert back to 24p for conversion to another format for archiving purposes. If your TV has a feature to detect and reverse 2:3 pulldown, often called film mode, try disabling it. The temporal compression breaks the cadence which exacerbates the jerkiness.

ABC does time-compress all their scripted primetime shows through the use of frame blending. This is easily shown by comparing the broadcasts on ABC to those on Canadian networks like CTV, where the Canadian broadcast ends up being 30-60 seconds longer once commercials are removed
wow coyoteaz thanks. I was unaware that broadcast networks did this. i thought this was only a cable television channel thing. As if 42 minutes were not short enough of an episode's running time.
In 1963 an hour of a scripted show ran just over 50 minutes (The Outer Limits).
This is one of the reasons I lament a half-hour format show on TV now as in 22 minutes you have to have 3 acts and also teases for the commercial breaks.

It goes to show that if you want the best quality of watching an episodic tv series you have to view it on Blu-ray for the highest data bit rate.