Low light shutter advice 24p and 30p?

F

firehawk

Veteran
What is a recommended shutter speed for shooting 24p when you need more light? 1/48? 1/24?

How about when shooting 30p?

What dangers must I guard against besides it needs to be a slow moving event (wedding), and autofocus will be slow?
If there is a flicker/lighting problem due to mixed lighting frequency will I be able to tell on the camera LCD / EVF?
 
Found this on the internet. Is this correct?
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There's an easy way to test to see if you're shooting in a situation that would be susceptible to the interference -- just pop over to a high shutter speed for a few seconds. Crank that shutter up to 1/500. If you see massive thick orange bands on the screen, then you know you *have* to shoot 1/60. If the screen still looks clear of orange bands, then 1/50 is okay.

Safe shutter speeds are 1/60, 1/40, 1/30. It doesn't matter what your frame rate is, if your shutter speed is not one of the above (or perhaps 1/120) you're going to have interference and complications and scrolling bands when shooting under magnetic-ballast fluorescents or HMIs or sodium-vapor or mercury-vapor lamps.
 
Those are my words, so I'd say they're correct. :)

If you need more light when shooting 24p, you can go to 1/24, but the image will be significantly blurrier than when at 1/48. For 30p you can go to 1/30th. In either case, you shouldn't encounter any flickering or light interference. Definitely try it out though to see if you like the look before you use it on a paying job.
 
Thank you for the help, Barry. I didn't notice those were your words I had found. :)

Also your "Sound for film and television" and "lighting.." are wonderful.
You (and many others) have helped me a lot through the years.
 
Barry_Green said:
Those are my words, so I'd say they're correct. :)

If you need more light when shooting 24p, you can go to 1/24, but the image will be significantly blurrier than when at 1/48. For 30p you can go to 1/30th. In either case, you shouldn't encounter any flickering or light interference. Definitely try it out though to see if you like the look before you use it on a paying job.
Click to expand...

+1

The common 'film' like setting is 1/48 for 24p footage.

The auto focus will probably be pretty bad and focus on the background, at least from my experience in low light. Put that thing on manual and LIGHT when you can.
 
Thank you. Yeah I like manually focussing for that very reason but the LCD on the 150 is so lacking i find it difficult to tell unless it gets way off so I flip back and forth to the focus assist to check. I wish those things had focus in red!
I may start using an external monitor but it's hard during run and gun when you have a light, mic, receiver and all that stuff to deal with. Wish they made a shoulder form factor 150 :)
Or just again....focus in red! Haha
 
I always used my DSLR rods and shoulder gear on my HMC - they still do the job on my AC90, too. Even a cheap amazon rod & plate setup, and something like Cavision shoulder & front handles is better than nothin'... I shot an event for a client that had three TV stations at it - College Station so everything was small panny P2 cameras & HMC 150 sized Sonys. All three shooters were "how did you shoulder mount that thing??? I want!!!"

Have you kicked the gain up a notch? It can help. Get a copy of Neat Video, it's pretty impressive. Shoot a blank wall or something at your setting for a given event and use that to tune the plugin (it loves a flat, even field to suss out the noise pattern). Best hundred bucks you ever spent.

As for flickering - man, LOTS of stuff will flicker at 1/500th; if you're in doubt, point the cam right at the light source and go up to 125-250th or so. I've never been surprised by flicker, it's always been apparent in the LCD, even on an old DVX.
 
Thank you, Michael.
Great advice and much appreciated.
Yes I have neat video and it's great. I try to avoid gain but sometimes go to 6db or 12db with the 150s.
I didn't know about shooting a black wall to establish a noise pattern for neat video.
Do you shoot a clip on the blank wall in the same room and then apply the effect on that clip then copy that onto the other clips?
Yeah a shoulder rig would be great. I'm going to look at some more cheap ones.
 
For neat video, try to shoot a mid- to low-mid exposed wall; your noise is more prevalent in the shadows. I don't think you need one every time as the camera's overall noise profile should be the same. But nice to have for various gain levels and ISO's.

The way neat works best is when you first use it, choose the "manual profiling" (or whatever they call it) and use a flat clip to select the square that it uses to calculate noise. Non-uniform tone or any one channel blown out and it will reject that crop. You use that to manually fine tune the noise detection - you want a number as close to 100 as possible. There are times I've found a chunk of even wall in a clip and used that to get something in the 70's, which works OK. Getting into the 80's is doable.

But once you've got the highest detection number you can get (that's maybe not what the plugin calls it but what you're going for when you manually set it up, don't have it open now) save that as a preset and name the preset after the camera - AND gain level or iSO - you shot the clip with.

Once that's done, every time you apply NV, you do a "load settings" and load the setting that matches your shot (such as "T2i 800iso" or "HMC150-mid gain"). Speeds up the process of manually tuning the plugin and likely gives you the best use of the algorithms too.

Other folks may pipe in, but it's a couple extra minutes that will save time down the road and use the plugin to its max.
 
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