shutter angle?
 

Can someone explain shutter angle to me?
I'm not a newbie . . . but i've never encountered this before.

I'm trying out the xf305 for a week and the manual is of no use in this and many other elements of the camera.

Thanks,

As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong):

At 360 degrees the shutter is "open", and will correspond to your frame rate. Ie: 24p = 1/24

As you reduce the degrees, the amount of light per frame is proportionately reduced, so at 24P:
270 degrees = 1/36, 180 degrees = 1/48 and so on.

I'm curious as to why this option of setting shutter by degrees (in addition to just dialing the shutter in as a fraction of a second) is available on the camera. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on the subject can shed light on its practical application.

Hi

The shutter degree values comes from ordinary film cameras where you have a mecanical shutter rotating between the lens and the film. A 180 degree shutter is a circular plate that has half of the plate cut off. If this plate is rotating 96 times per second it will expose each square of the film 1/48 second.

Regards,

/Bo

Wikipedia has a decent short discussion of this topic: Rotary disc shutter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -- I guess I'm old enough to remember when shutter angle was the main way of specifying shutter "speed" :-).

So what's the best setting to have it on for normal use?

Yeah . . . what's the application?
When would this be useful?

Shutter angle vs. shutter speed is the basically the same thing as . . .
Fahrenheit vs. Celcius
or
Meters vs. Feet.

It's just two different ways of describing the exact same measurement.

180 degree shutter is equivalent to 1/48th for 24P shooting
180 degree shutter is equivalent to 1/60 for 30P shooting

Shutter angle terminology is a hold over from the film production world, but the advantage of using the shutter angle mode on a video camera is that you can just set it on 180 degrees and then you don't have to bother with changing the shutter speed when you switch from 24P to 30P. The shutter speed is going to be the equivalent of 1/60 or 1/48 automatically. That is when it is useful.

Ah, thanks!