Quick question regarding shutter speed, please help.

C

Cieloent

Well-known member
I was shooting some quick footage yesterday and had my shutter speed at 30 as opposed to 60 like I always have it. Honestly I never really mess with the shutter speed and only adjust the lens aperture and cameras iso for lighting.


I seen that using 30 allowed more light. I honestly cannon tell the difference ( video wise) from 60 and 30. Can someone who has more experienced a better trained eye tell me what the difference is and if it is ok for me to be using 30?


Thank you
 
Well, 1/30 is certainly going to have a brighter exposure than 1/60 as the shutter is open for twice the time as 1/60. What you'll also notice is more blur in faster motion, and it may cause problems with household/commercial lighting.

Is it okay for you to be using 1/30? Well, sure... if you find that it attains the look you want and you don't experience (or don't mind) artifacts from it. And if you are outside and shooting something like running water (fountain, creek, waterfall) that you'd like to soften, slower shutter speeds are necessary. But for most everything else, there's really no reason. Use aperture and ND filtering to adjust your exposure before you mess with ISO if you're shooting in anything other than low-light situations, and save changes to shutter speed only for times where they're absolutely necessary.
 
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C2V said:
Well, 1/30 is certainly going to have a brighter exposure than 1/60 as the shutter is open for twice the time as 1/60. What you'll also notice is more blur in faster motion, and it may cause problems with household/commercial lighting.

Is it okay for you to be using 1/30? Well, sure... if you find that it attains the look you want and you don't experience (or don't mind) artifacts from it. And if you are outside and shooting something like running water (fountain, creek, waterfall) that you'd like to soften, slower shutter speeds are necessary. But for most everything else, there's really no reason. Use aperture and ND filtering to adjust your exposure before you mess with ISO if you're shooting in anything other than low-light situations.
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Thank you for the helpful post and also I needed to be more informative with my original post. This is entirely in low light /night time scenes. When I have light I never touch iso or shutter speed. Basically my shutter is always at 60 and my iso is always at 100.

In low light areas or indoors I usually max out my iso at 1600 but try to always be at 800. My shutter speed still remains at 60 but when I bumped it down to 30 it allowed more light and from what I can tell I did not see any blur in movements. I was recording a small performance inside of an indoor location yesterday where I simply could not have lighting ( other than an on camera light). I was recording with a 50mm at 1.8-2.0


I'm starting to think if I should start saving up money for a 5d as a full frame camera would help me more in those low light situations I am always running into 50% of the time.

Any other thoughts or suggestions I can do?


Thanks
 
1/30th lets in twice as much light as 1/60th does. It also allows for substantially more blur. Some variation in shutter speed is usually not any big deal, film cameras usually range anywhere from about 1/43 on up to 1/60 as default shutter speeds. 1/30th would be considered a pretty big departure as opposed to the typical look; it might be totally fine for minor-motion events such as a talking head interview, but for scenes with a lot of motion in it, it'd look blurry.

One place you never want to use 1/30th, is when shooting 720/60p. When shooting 720/60p, any shutter speed slower than 1/60th will actually cause the frame rate of your footage to be cut in half. So using 1/30th with 1080/24p or 1080/30p is fine, but you wouldn't want to use it with 720/60p (unless you really meant to turn your footage into 720/30p!)
 
Barry_Green said:
1/30th lets in twice as much light as 1/60th does. It also allows for substantially more blur. Some variation in shutter speed is usually not any big deal, film cameras usually range anywhere from about 1/43 on up to 1/60 as default shutter speeds. 1/30th would be considered a pretty big departure as opposed to the typical look; it might be totally fine for minor-motion events such as a talking head interview, but for scenes with a lot of motion in it, it'd look blurry.

One place you never want to use 1/30th, is when shooting 720/60p. When shooting 720/60p, any shutter speed slower than 1/60th will actually cause the frame rate of your footage to be cut in half. So using 1/30th with 1080/24p or 1080/30p is fine, but you wouldn't want to use it with 720/60p (unless you really meant to turn your footage into 720/30p!)
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Thank you as always for your informative post Barry, you truly are a Master Professor to us all. Since this is for a Music video where anything goes ( the type of music I record) then even if there were some blur which I did not initially notice it would be fine because I can always act like it was an effect.

Generally though I would really never want to do that though unless forced. Clients sometimes just don't understand that we need light. The T2i is a great camera but it does have it's limitations, but knowing them and working around them is what we must do.

My final post on this matter, would a 5D truly be that much better in low light vs a T2i/ 7D?

Also if I were to save up for a 5D I now know I would need a lot of new lenses due to it being a FF camera :undecided
 
Cieloent said:
Since this is for a Music video where anything goes ( the type of music I record) then even if there were some blur which I did not initially notice it would be fine because I can always act like it was an effect.
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And if the client doesn't like it? If you're asked to remove the "effect?" The minute you not only accept sub-standard product but try to excuse it with "I meant to do that," you have compromised your morals as a director and thus jeopardized your reputation. Be careful with that. And that is not meant to be taken personally, but as a bit of sincere advice.

Cieloent said:
Also if I were to save up for a 5D I now know I would need a lot of new lenses due to it being a FF camera :undecided
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Really? A lens with Canon EOS mount is a lens with Canon EOS mount. The only thing you'll see different with the 5D is all of what the lens sees as opposed to most of what the lens sees.

Or am I missing something?
 
C2V said:
Or am I missing something?
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Depends on if he's using EF-S lenses. If so, those won't work on a larger-frame camera. it's true that they'll mount on it, because the mount is the mount, but they'll vignette awfully because they were only designed to cover the APS-C sized sensor.

But if Ciolent is using regular full-frame lenses, then obviously those would translate over to a 5D just fine.
 
Barry_Green said:
Depends on if he's using EF-S lenses. If so, those won't work on a larger-frame camera. it's true that they'll mount on it, because the mount is the mount, but they'll vignette awfully because they were only designed to cover the APS-C sized sensor.

But if Ciolent is using regular full-frame lenses, then obviously those would translate over to a 5D just fine.
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Well, color me corrected! You learn something new every day.

Thanks for clearing that up, Barry. I had seen a couple of posts recently about folks thinking they needed new lenses for the 5D, but didn't realize the differences.
 
C2V said:
And if the client doesn't like it? If you're asked to remove the "effect?" The minute you not only accept sub-standard product but try to excuse it with "I meant to do that," you have compromised your morals as a director and thus jeopardized your reputation. Be careful with that. And that is not meant to be taken personally, but as a bit of sincere advice.



Really? A lens with Canon EOS mount is a lens with Canon EOS mount. The only thing you'll see different with the 5D is all of what the lens sees as opposed to most of what the lens sees.

Or am I missing something?
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First of all I know what you are trying to say , but let me explain myself further . I told the client I needed light to film correctly and he told me no because of the location we were in, so my decision as a "director" was to film it with a slower shutter speed to let in more light rather than simply not film at all or film at my regular shutter speed and have the scene be dark. Maybe I chose the wrong words in stating that if it did not look right I would have told him it was an effect ,what I needed to say was that due to low light I had to put my camera in a certain mode to record. So yes I understand what you meant, but trust me that this is not something I would usually do and I used a poor choice in words on how I would just say it was an effect as this is something that we love we should always respect "The Art"


If I did not have love or passion for this I would not even be on these forums let alone worry so much like I do.

Last but not least I thank Barry for pointing out that EF-S lenses will vignette on FF cameras. Before people "ASSUME" something bad about someone you should take the time to really analyze the situation.
 
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