what does changing shutter on A1 do to footage?

[Mark Leonard]

shot some footage (1440x1080 60i) at 1/100th ss to get some slow motion shots. i happened to be in the shade in a garage and shooting stuff moving outside in the sun (was a very bright sunny day). i noticed that when i scrub through the footage of the outside stuff in premiere pro, its hazy and blurry. ive never got footage like this out of my A1. but ive never changed the shutter speed before. there's a quick part of footage where camera is facing into garage and shooting in the shade and it looks a little better than the sunny shot clips. so did i screw up my footing shooting from shade to sunlight or did the change of the shutter speed do this and i can fix in post? thanks

[Colin McDonald]

Shutter speed, along with aperture, gain and use of the ND filters mainly affects the exposure, but at lower values (less than1/50 sec) the sharpness of the image may suffer due to motion of the subject. On the other hand very high shutter speed values can make the footage look rather jerky instead of smooth.
A bit of motion blur is not necessarily a bad thing – we are used to it in film.

It would help to know what settings you normally use (eg full auto – "the green rectangle"?) and what settings you were using when you noticed this (shutter priority – "Tv"?)

[Michael Hutson]

normal shutter speed is 60 for 30fps and 60fps footage
normal shutter speed is 48 for 24fps footage

Increasing your shutter speed will give you an effect like the war scenes in Saving Private Ryan - jerky.

Not know what mode you are shooting in the apature setting will make the footage soft. 4.5-5.0 is the sweet spot for the A1 for the sharpest image.

Strongly recommend learn to operate the camera in manual....this will you know what the camera is doing automatically when you are in the other modes(av/tv)

Hope this info helps.

[Chris Soucy]

Hi, Mark........

Amateur class in video (from an amateur, so "Mano El Mano", OK?)

I used to do stills, bottom line, get it as crisp and clear as it can be got.

The bugger with that? Lots of light, camera locked off, stonking shutter speed and great attention to detail.

For one (1) shot, one frame, nothing more.

Video: you're now talking either 24/25/ 30 progressive or 50/ 60 interlaced frames/ fields per second.

That's one heck of a lot of frames/ fields.

We've become very used to the Hollywood 24 frames per second film speed, possibly shot at 1/48th of a second shutter speed.

That, for a stills shooter, is simply rediculous, because of the amount of blur that will happen due to the low shutter speed, but that's what happens in movies all the time, our brains simply "get over it" and "see" it as clear images.

When you up the shutter speed to 1/100 or even beyond, what you get is a sequence of progessively "stills" type images in sequence, so it looks like those drawings you can do on a pad, then flick the pages to make the picture "move", however flickery they are.

The slower shutter speed allows the "blur" to happen, which our brain translates to perfectly clean, clear video/ movie.

The higher you up that shutter speed, the worse it gets.

HOWEVER, for a relatively non motion sequence, the higher shutter speed can be a boon, but you must always remember to keep within the lenses operational charachteristics curve, which in your case means not going higher than about F5.6 on the aperture.

Using the system in full manual is pretty well a must with that A1 system, anything else is letting it and you down badly, because you're letting it make the decisions, which it isn't always programmed to do to best effect.

Just my 2 cents.


CS

[Bill Engeler]

As the others have mentioned, the softness you describe sounds like it was caused by a too-small aperture. In full sunlight, if you don't have the ND on max you will certainly get hazy, blurry, crappy footage. In auto mode, the camera will change the shutter speed to whatever it needs to keep the f-stop low, even to very high, strobe-y numbers, but as soon as you go manual on the shutter, you have to ride the ND.

[Don Palomaki]

[Quote]shot some footage (1440x1080 60i) at 1/100th ss to get some slow motion shots.[\Quote]

Shutter speed effects exposure and motion blur, and at the extremes, sensor artifacts such as dark current accumulation. To the extent it causes you to change aperture it can effect depth of field and other lens artifacts. It does not give slow motion, because in general it does not change the frame/field rate of the video (e.g., 60i for NTSC). If you convert the footage to slo-mo in your NLE by repeating fields you may find 60i gives a smoother slo-mo effect.

High shutter speeds can give motion in the video a hint of a strobed look due to reduced montion blur.