60fps with what shutter speed for no flicker

D

d90123

Member
My ideal videos settings I use outdoors are 60fps, aperture priority, auto ISO with a manual lens. I love this and it gives me exactly what I need.

The problem comes when I move indoors. I am currently residing in Asia, I want to keep the above settings, but I get a very prominent flicker. My camera is NTSC and there is no PAL mode.

What I have done to counteract this is go to 30fps indoors (which I hate), shutter priority at 1/50 second, auto iso. This works, but I HATE losing the 60fps.

I have experimented with shooting 60fps with a shutter speed of 1/50 a few times. Things seem to work, which I do not even understand how that is possible in the first place. But the footage appears to be ok for the most part as far as I can tell.

Regardless of that, is there any better solution to staying at 60fps indoors without getting the flickr? I have definitely tried moving to 1/100 shutter speed and that produces flickr for some reason which I fail to understand (I thought multiples of light frequency would be ok but it does not seem to be the case).

Thanks for any help or suggestions.
 
If you can't use a PAL camera then maybe try 'Synchro Scan' if it's available in your system.

All types of cameras behave differently under lights; some flicker more than others at various speeds, or some have horizontal rolling bars while others won't. It's difficult to predict them in uncontrollable environments.
 
Also, you isn't say what type of lighting it is: tungsten, flo's, LED's... I used to run into issues with seeing the lights "roll" on flo's when I was higher than 1/60(60fps US), even at multiples, as they would phase in and out with the camera. It wasn't a huge deal, as they were't the primary light source. We'd see them in the background occasionally if the teams left the doors to their transporters open.

My point, different lighting tech can present different problems. We've had to use "clear scan/syncro-scan" before with certain "architectural"(built into the set pieces) LED's in the background in a TV studio, before. That one kind of blew my mind how that slipped though, considering this was a network and a STUDIO, AND even though all the cameras were the same, not everyone could run the same "clear-scan" speed to dial it out. And I was on a shoot a few months ago with my F55 and other F55's. There was this big "tree" in the middle of the room that had LED's built in all over the branches and I had to shoot with a completely different shutter speed to get the LED flicker/roll out than what the other cameras were using, but that just goes to show how difficult and how many variables there are, today.
 
Thank you for the replies! I will look into the suggestions. It is every type of lighting, sometimes all at the same time.

1/50 works perfectly almost everywhere I go. 1/100 does not work at all.

If I may narrow down my question, what exactly is the drawback of shooting 1/50 at 60fps? What artifacts should I be seeing? My camera, a gx85, lets me set it to 1/50 at 60fps but I am not quite sure what exactly is going on, or if it is even shooting at 1/50.

I suppose I will just start shooting at 1/50 60fps, I was just worried if I shoot some important footage one day what i may be up against.
 
If you play the 60p footage that was captured with a 1/50 shutter in real time you won't notice a difference.

However - and this is important - if you plan on playing the 60p in a 24p timeline as slow-motion, the shutter needs to be NO LOWER than 1/60 or you will have terrible motion rendering. Your footage will playback choppy and it will be unusable.

So for slow-motion keep that in mind...60p needs to have at least a 1/60 shutter.

This has bit me more than once and most cameras (Panasonic definitely does) do not let you go lower than 1/60 in 60p.
 
NorBro said:
If you play the 60p footage that was captured with a 1/50 shutter in real time you won't notice a difference.

However - and this is important - if you plan on playing the 60p in a 24p timeline as slow-motion, the shutter needs to be NO LOWER than 1/60 or you will have terrible motion rendering. Your footage will playback choppy and it will be unusable.

So for slow-motion keep that in mind...60p needs to have at least a 1/60 shutter.

This has bit me more than once and most cameras (Panasonic definitely does) do not let you go lower than 1/60 in 60p.
Click to expand...

This is really an excellent point! The ideal compromise would be to shoot 1/50 at 50p... but I think your camera is NTSC only, right?

Maybe consider trading it in for a PAL version (or move to Japan). Or, experiment with 1/50 at 60p, but use a 29.97p timeline... it's going from 2.5x to 2x slow-mo, but trust me, the flickering/rolling bars is a PIA to fix in post (if it can be fixed at all).
 
Are you sure that recording 60P with a 1/50th shutter is not causing the camera to duplicate frames? I know previous GH bodies had this issue whenever the shutter was less than the reciprocal of the frame rate, & never understood why Panasonic allowed it.
 
Seanik said:
This is really an excellent point! The ideal compromise would be to shoot 1/50 at 50p... but I think your camera is NTSC only, right?

Maybe consider trading it in for a PAL version (or move to Japan). Or, experiment with 1/50 at 60p, but use a 29.97p timeline... it's going from 2.5x to 2x slow-mo, but trust me, the flickering/rolling bars is a PIA to fix in post (if it can be fixed at all).
Click to expand...

Yes, 50p at 1/50 would be ideal for sure. I do always use 29.97 timelines.

I suppose the next step is to try shooting at 1/50 at 60p and seeing how the slow motion is. Are you saying this may work?
 
I just did some quick testing of 1/50 vs 1/60 in slow motion on a 29.97 timeline and the slow motion does look very funky on the 1/50 clips. I noticed the warp stabilizer, which I use a lot, consistently produced some very unusable "shaking" patterns in the background of the 1/50 clips.

So the 1/50 shutter speed option is out.

At this point I think getting a PAL camera or putting up with 1/100 flickering are my best bets.
 
At this point I think getting a PAL camera or putting up with 1/100 flickering are my best bets.
Click to expand...

Just be aware, you won't always be able to catch flickering during production. I got burned once shooting in 50i (in the USA) at an office building that was entirely lit by old florescent overheads (probably 60hz ballasts/tubes). Long story short, I didn't detect any flicker on camera LCD screen because i was in the flicker, itself. Had I thought to study the image through the EVF more closely, I may have noticed it (this is now a strictly enforced habit of mine, btw). That was a painful lesson. Best of luck, whatever you chose to do!
 
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