Having Shutter Speed a Multiple of Frame Rate is Now Old Hat!

[MikeOfBonsall]

Shooting S-Log outside in bright conditions. Needing always too have small aperture that is not sharpest I bough a bunch on ND filters. Results seemed like they should be better so I shot some footage with no filters and the camera on full auto to see what the camera does. The results were very good and I noticed the camera (when making its own decisions) does not restrict shutter speed to a multiple of the frame rate. It was shooting 30p at 1/1250 at f4!

 

So now I set my camera to the f-stop I want, leave iso on lowest and control exposure with the shutter, and that gives the best results I have got so far.

 

I'm anticipating some great comments.

[cws]

Again comes back to specifics of what your subject is....

- if you want shallow depth of field you need a wide f-stop like f4,

- if you have a subject that is moving through frame and you want a "normal" motion blur that helps smooth out the motion then you wouldn't want such a high shutter speed as 1/1250th, so you'd have to ND down to a "standard" shutter speed (eg 1/60th = 180deg shutter at 30fps)

- however if you essentially have little or no movement in frame, or you want/like that "frozen movement" look on anything moving through frame, then you can have whatever shutter speed you like to give best exposure with no (or limited) ND's... removing another layer or more of glass that will otherwise reduce overall sharpness, and potentially introduce flare etc to the image.

Rules are there to be broken, if it works for you.... but it's good to know the rules.