HD choppiness in Panning shots

Could you be more specific? I'm not aware of seeing "choppy edges" when shooting with the F900. Are you talking about motion strobing from shooting at 24P?
 
That's just the result of using such a low frame rate as 24 fps to capture motion. You can reduce the strobiness by increasing the shutter time from 1/48 to 1/32 or 1/24 (shutter off) but then you get smeariness instead of strobiness.

It looks much worse in the camera's LCD screens.
 
Why would it be because of the framerate? Why then do pans in movies look fine on a television set? Do you think watching the playback in a dimly lit room would allow the motion to appear more fluid?
 
Low frame rate = fewer motion samples per second. Fluid motion is an illusion in movies caused by the rapid succession of still images. Not enough time slices of reality and you sense that these are a series of still frames, not smooth continuous motion. 24 fps is actually a rather low frame rate to create the illusion of smooth motion. To some extent, the motion blur per frame helps hide this, which is why short shutter speeds with less blur per frame create strobiness (and why "pixellation", traditional stop-motion animation, looks staccatto because there is no blur per frame).

Now some people theorize that the sharper-looking motion of 24P video with a 1/48 shutter is due to the crispness of an electronic shutter, which instanty shuts on or off, whereas a rotating mechanical shutter sweeps across the gate to close it. This combined with the edgier look of digital images (partially due to edge enhancement) and the deeper focus of small sensored cameras (so more detail is in focus, calling attention to more areas of the frame) contribute to the strobiness of 24P. Combine that with some of the lagginess of cameras LCD screens and the fact that most 24P and 24 fps film material is shown on a TV set at higher frequencies like 60 Hz.

Generally you'll find that 24P material transferred to 60i for monitoring or to film for projection, the strobiness is a little less annoying than what's seen in the camera.

But that said, perhaps one solution is to use bigger-sensored HD cameras with more resolution and less depth of field (to reduce the need for edge enhancement and to get a shallower-focus look) perhaps combined with switching from 1/48 to 1/32 to increase the per-frame blur, may help reduce the problem.

Otherwise, even 24 fps films traditionally watch their panning speed to avoid strobiness. Any old film manual has "safe panning speeds" guidelines.
 

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