Saturday, October 10, 2015

shutter speed for 24p video - 1/25 of a second!!

And while I'm documenting things I learn so I don't forget them..

The standard procedure is to always shoot video with your shutter speed double the framerate. Ie - for 24 fps, shutter speed would be 1/50 of a second. Or that's as close as you can get anyway - on a PAL camera it would be exact because of the 25 fps framerate. But it actually works better to use a much lower shutter speed, which increases brightness considerably and gives more motion blur. And by lower I mean 1/25 of a second. Sounds crazy, and you'll get a lot of extremely pissed off shouting from people who learned the standard programming and have never tried anything different.

I first heard this on the Personal Views website, where people discuss hacking the GH2 and other Panasonic cameras - it's to combat the excessive strobing (judder, shudder or what have you) that you can get when panning rapidly using a high bitrate hacked camera - objects moving sideways tend to show up as double or even triple images and move in a jerky fashion. The standard way to deal with this in film and video in The Biz is to always pan very slowly - they even have a formula to figure it out (and you know how much I love formulas, right? Pfft!)

Because of the increased motion blur it actually creates a much more filmic look, at least I think. Though that might just be my initial impression - frequently when you first discover something really cool like this it delights you and then after you come down from that and see it with a more sober eye you realize it's gimmicky and crude - time will tell. Anyway, now I've got the info documented here (and this is exactly the kind of technical stuff that tends to evaporate from my brain quickly).

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