Anyone Film DJ club strobe lights with DSLRs

edsonkwushu

edsonkwushu

Active member
I wanted to use a DJ strobe light for a music video that I will be shooting on a Canon 60D.

I decided to get one from the party store and test it. What I am experiencing is the light only lighting up portions of the screen. For example, when the strobe flickers, it'll will light say 7/8 of the screen and then it will light half and then 1/4 and the remaining areas are unlit. It's a horrible flicker. I tried playing with my shutter and adjusting the flicker of the strobe but no settings seem to be able to fix this problem. Is this a disadvantage of the codec, how the DSLR image is recorded?

Anyone have a way around it? Thanks a lot for your help!
 
This is a disadvantage of how the immage is aquired and has nothing to do with the codec.
The camera scans the scene row by row, and your strobe doesnt stay on long enough.
If you can make your strobe slower, then you might have a shot of something looking good, or you can do frame by frame and match the over exposure for each strobe.

Edit, by slower I mean the increasing the length of time the strobe is on, not decreasing the interval of the strobes.
 
kevinottawa said:
by slower I mean the increasing the length of time the strobe is on, not decreasing the interval of the strobes.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Kevin. This completely makes sense. Perhaps I might be better off using a flikermaster instead of an actual strobe. I definitely can't increase the length of the individual strobe flashes. Is this feature even possible on more robust, DJ strobe lights?
 
This is caused by the CMOS rolling shutter. You can control the length of the pulse with high end strobes, the Martin Atomic will go up to about 650 ms. However, even if you increased the length of time the strobe is on, you'd still have the problem of the top section of the frame being dark and the bottom being bright when the strobe turns on partway through the exposure. You're right that it wouldn't be as noticable if there were a completely lit frame following the first one. You may also have the same problem when the light turns off.
 
You can't shoot strobes on a rolling-shutter CMOS camera... if you really want to do this, consider renting a CCD camera for this particular shoot.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top