Pan & Scan implementation

I've noticed when movies use "pan & scan" to map a larger filmed area to a smaller tv screen, the panning effect is very noticable.

To me it looks like while the movie is displayed at whatever it's framerate is, like 15 or 20 frames per second (I don't know what it's supposed to be) the panning occurs faster, say 30 frames per second.

That's what looks so odd, is that the smoother panning of the pan & scan is out of place with the jerkier motion of the movie.

So my question is, why can't the reducing the panning speed to match the original rate? It would take longer to pan to a certain location, but then it again it would not look so bad. anyone in the industry know?

Movies are shot at almost 24 frames a second. NTSC television is nearly 30 frames a second. The extra 6 frames a second are done using a process called 2:3 pulldown - basically, frames are spread over alternating interlaced fields to "stretch" them. This can introduce a certain jerkiness to motion (particularly camera motion) that is not present in the film original or PAL/SECAM transfers. If the pan and scan cropping is done after the pulldown, then the artificial camera motion looks smoother than any actual motion that was present in the original, since it hasn't been subjected to that "time stretching" pulldown process. The way to fix this would be to transfer the film at 24fps to digital tape, do the pan and scan cropping at that same frame rate, then convert to NTSC frame rate. I haven't heard of this being a standard procedure. But then if you're that much of a purist that the frame rate of artifical camera motion bothers you, why the heck are you watching mangled pan and scan movies anyway?

Lol NTSC lol. But I think movies still at 24 fps in the 21th Century is quite lame. For some reason, camera motion looks even worse in cinemas than in my PAL TVs (maybe it's a visual effect of seeing it in a much larger screen, I don't know).