Moving object flickers or jumps unnaturally — insufficient frame rate fails to capture smooth motion. Classic issue with fast pans at low framerates.
When fast movements in the image start to flicker or jump instead of running smoothly, you are dealing with temporal aliasing. The phenomenon occurs because your frame rate does not sample the speed of movement sufficiently—to put it simply: the camera or the object moves faster than your temporal resolution can capture. The result looks as if the moving element is jumping between individual positions instead of gliding smoothly.
You most often see this problem with fast camera pans at 24fps or with high-frequency patterns moving across the frame—a rotating wheel, a blinking neon sign, or even camera movements through geometric scene elements. The solution is simple: either increase the frame rate (60fps or higher helps immediately), or ensure that an anti-aliasing filter dampens the high-frequency motion components before sampling—this is your insurance with classic motion blur. In contrast to spatial aliasing, which creates stair-step effects in static lines, temporal aliasing happens in the temporal dimension: the eye perceives it as flickering or waggling, not as jaggedness.
In practice, you encounter this problem when shooting with a low frame rate and extreme pans or fast object movements. Motion blur—whether optical through a longer shutter speed on set or synthetic in the VFX process—is your standard tool to mask it. Some projects (especially in animation or motion capture) deliberately work with higher frame rates in production and downsample in the final output to exclude temporal aliasing from the outset. Also, pay attention to the shutter angle: a narrow shutter (e.g., 90°) gives you less motion blur and exacerbates aliasing effects—one reason why some cinematographers switch to 180° or even 270° for fast movements. In digital cinema, the problem is less dramatic than it used to be in the celluloid era, but it remains relevant, especially when you have to compress heavily or play with variable frame rates.