Why DVD playback is jerky when panning?

[videdit]

I notice when watching (some? all?) anime DVD if the scene pans horizontally or vertically, it would become jerky all of a sudden. When the panning stops, the jerkiness stops. I don't remember if this occurs only on anime or also on motion picture -- I've gotten so used to seeing it I don't think about it.

Normal TV programming do not have this issue.

I'm about to buy a new TV and would like to know if there's anything I can do to eliminate this jerky playback issue. I think it has something to do with telecine. Can TVs that does "reverse telecine" eliminate this jerkiness? How about the ones with 120Hz refresh?

This is for a NTSC dvd/tv.

[manono]

Because anime often isn't drawn at 24fps, but 16, 12, and even 8fps, it often plays with a lot more jerkiness during movement. I don't know if this is the case with your particular panning scene or not, but you can check by advancing a frame at a time when playing it. If each frame is followed by a duplicate or two, then that would explain it. I'm assuming the anime was encoded as progressive. If hard telecine then that might introduce another reason for jerkiness when being deinterlaced.

And no, the type of TV used won't change anything. Not unless the anime really is hard telecine (encoded as interlaced 29.97fps rather than as progressive 23.976fps with pulldown). In that case the playback might be slightly improved by owning either a cadence reading DVD player (as opposed to a flag reader which won't help at all), or TV set. If you can't figure it out yourself, upload a small sample that illustrates the problem

[edDV]

For interlace video, telecine adds fields to pad out 23.976 fps to 29.97 fps. This causes motion "judder" (i.e alternate fast then slow) most noticeable during slow pans and/or zooms.

For progressive film source video, 23.976 fps is padded out to 59.94 fps with repeat frames in a 2:3:2:3 pattern giving an abrupt slow-fast-slow-fast motion judder.

"120 Hz" HDTV sets eliminate the judder by repeating film frames 5:5:5:5 to 119.88 fps for display. The motion jumps are at a constant 23.976 film rate. An alternate mode interpolates the 4 intermediate frames using motion estimation. This gives smoother motion but usually adds artifacts due to estimation errors.

Anime may still have problems if motion changes are at other than 23.976 rate. They usually are.