"My camera is choppy." Two hours later: my camera was never the problem.
The tells that cracked it:
- Smooth in slow motion, so it was not a hitch.
- Still choppy at 120 fps, so it was not framerate.
- Buttery when the camera was idle, so it was something revealed by motion.
The real culprits were three unrelated things stacking up:
- Thin field lines shimmering under motion. The procedural pitch lines were sub-pixel at broadcast distance, and the temporal upscaler could not reproject them cleanly from frame to frame, so they crawled.
- Motion blur smearing those lines wider on every pan, which made the crawl look like the whole image was wobbling.
- The camera's look-at snapping each frame instead of easing, which put a tiny stair-step into every rotation.
The fixes: anti-alias the lines in the material so they hold a stable one-pixel width at any distance, interpolate the camera rotation instead of snapping it, and switch motion blur off. Buttery.
The lesson is the usual one. Lead with the wrong assumption for long enough and you will optimise the wrong thing. Measure where the wobble actually lives first.
Shipped: anti-aliased pitch lines · smoothed camera rotation · motion blur off