Shutter smear...

[Brook Willard]

Any plans to integrate shutter smear? With a digitally controlled shutter and such a broad range of control available, it seems reasonable that digital shutter smear could be integrated. Pixels on the sensor could be mapped to expose at slightly different times but for the same interval, resulting in the same visual phenomenon that a rotating shutter creates.

This is not to say that I noticed strobing. For all I know, smear could already be integrated into the digital shutter mapping. It could also be impossible... I just don't know.

Any plans?

[JD Holloway]

Post effect?

[Jarred Land]

shutter smear isnt a good thing... so i dont know why you would want to make the camera do it by default. Alot of work is actually done to reduce smear, specially amongst highlights.

[Brook Willard]

I've just found that sometimes the smear resulting from a 180 degree shutter helps combat strobing, most notably at the beginning of or end of a camera movement. Perhaps I've mislabeled what I'm thinking of...

[Graeme Nattress]

Or look at it the other way: it's edge sharpness that makes for stutter. That's why HD stutters even when shot like film as they always seem to crank the edge sharpness way up. Bring it down and shoot with 35mm DOF and you don't get the stutter you'd normally get.

Graeme

[Jason Francois]

Would strobing be the jittering effect on the white lettering on the tail of the plane during a couple of the dogfight shots in the footage?

I never got a chance to ask what this was due to, but it was fairly pronounced.

Now, before any fanboys go overboard on me, just know that I still think the foogtage was phenominal. :)

[Graeme Nattress]

I had the feeling that some of the stuff I saw in the aerial shots was more to do with the camera being shaken around, but I'm not 100% sure. That said, as we refine things in the lab, we'll learn more about the the cameras in this regard.

Graeme

[Brook Willard]

I know what you're talking about, insanity. I believe it was a result of the helicopter mount's apparent sketchiness.

[David Mullen ASC]

If the electronic shutter seems to be a little "crisper" than its mechanical counterpart in a film camera, one solution might be to just slightly increase the exposure time, like using a 200 or 220 degree shutter instead of the standard 180 degree shutter. This would add a little more smear to the motion, but not be too objectionable.

In 24P HD, I sometimes use a 1/32 shutter speed instead of 1/48 -- partly to gain another half-stop of light, but also to reduce strobing at the expense of more smearing. In a low-light emergency, I might use 1/24 but then you definitely get a non-film-like smeariness with faster motion.

As Graeme is saying, the other culprit is edge-enhancement in video, which exagerrates the sharpness of the moving edge.

I'd also think that, to some degree, the excessive depth of field that some video cameras have also would contribute to the feeling of strobiness, because more of the image is in sharp focus, thus your eye is paying attention to more areas of the frame that are strobing. Just a theory.

[Graeme Nattress]

That sounds right David. Because we don't have the moving blade we can compensate for opening the shutter very slightly longer. Be interesting to try that on RED as soon as that's all enabled. Might be good to work out special visually equivalent shutter speeds to match a rotating shutter if that ends up being the case.

One of the nice things about doing 4k is the lack of need for the excessive edge sharpening you need on lower resolutions. That said, if you look at the NHK 8k stuff, it's very edge enhanced, and suffers because of it....

Graeme