Stutter / Stop-Stutter

Frames repeat, so the motion advances in steps instead of flowing. The movement still gets where it is going and the path it takes is broken.

The eye reads it as a fault in the recording, which is the point. It suits panic, malfunction and anything that should feel like the footage itself is struggling.

One frame is held for two, three or four slots instead of one. At 24 frames per second, holding every frame twice gives a 12 frame per second cadence with no change in the speed the action travels at.

The rhythm carries the meaning. An even stutter reads as mechanical, like a dropped signal or a damaged file. An uneven one reads as a body or a mind faltering.

Nothing else changes. The exposure, the blur and the overall duration all stay as they were, so a stutter is a cadence rather than a speed.

Use it on a signal breaking up, a drug taking hold, or a memory that will not play cleanly.

Avoid it across a whole sequence. A stutter is fatiguing by design, and a scene that never smooths out stops registering as broken.

Step printing repeats frames as well, and it adds a smeared trail from a long exposure. A plain stutter has clean frames with gaps in the rhythm.

The test is the edge of the moving thing. Sharp and jumping is a stutter. Smeared and jumping is step printing.

The motion comes back smooth, because smooth is what a model is built to produce. Say frames repeat and the movement jerks forward in steps.

The second failure is slow motion. A stutter does not change how long the action takes, so add that the overall speed stays the same and only the cadence breaks. Name the rhythm as even or ragged.