From the course: Shooting with Blackmagic Cinema Cameras

Choosing the right shutter angle and shutter speed

From the course: Shooting with Blackmagic Cinema Cameras

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Choosing the right shutter angle and shutter speed

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- Depending upon your background, there are two different ways to talk about your camera's shutter. This affects the speed or the angle and this really has some effects on the overall motion properties with the camera. If you come from a more filmic background, you're used to seeing shutter expressed as an angle and there are several presets for this. If you have more of photography background, you're used to shutter being expressed as a matter of a fractional second, how much is the shutter open for? Obviously when shooting video, we keep the shutter open, but this does affect the motion properties, how much motion streaking we have, and how much light is coming into the camera. Let's take a look at this for a moment and I'll go into my settings here and take a look at setup. And you see we could choose between shutter speed and shutter angle. Let's go with that more traditional, shutter angle. Now what happens is we have shutter expressed up here in a matter of degrees. This can go usually up to 360 degrees and this is going to produce the most motion blur. Let's go ahead and record on that for a moment. Now, with this type of setting, you're going to see more overall blur to the shot. Now we'll stop. Now, while it's still moving, let's switch this to a lower one. And you see much sharper, but less light getting into the camera. I'll go ahead and open this up just a little bit, get a little bit more light, and open up the ISO, so we have a similar exposed shot. And let's record. In this case, the shutter is open for less time. The 30 degree shutter angle means that less light gets into the camera, but it gives us sharper individual frames per video. You'll see less blur on the video frame. If we use a shutter angle of 360 degrees you will see significantly more motion blur on each frame. Now, it's difficult to sometimes see this when the video is playing back, but it is detectable by the eye. If you're using something like 30 degrees, action frames are going to feel more crisp and more staccato. So depending upon the subject matter, you may need to adjust this. Now, if you don't want to use angles, you can also think of this in units of time. Let's go back into the menu here, and we'll switch from shutter angle to shutter speed. We're now at a standard shutter speed of a 60th, which produces very natural motion when shooting at 30 frames per second. However, I need to reduce the sensitivity here, because more light was getting in the camera. If we record that, this is a very standard video-type motion. And later on when you evaluate the frames, you'll see just a moderate amount of motion blur. Now, if we switch this up, and we change the shutter speed here to something that's even slower, you'll see a little bit more light gets into the camera. On the other hand, if we go to a faster one here, such as one 500th of a second, we obviously need to bump up the ISO 'cause less light is getting into the camera. But the individual frames are going to be far crisper and this can be quite useful if you're shooting very fast moving objects. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that the environment is often going to dictate this. You will use shutter speed as a way to control the amount of light, particularly when shooting outdoors. You'll typically not want to adjust the aperture, because that's going to change, of course the amount of light, but also the depth of field and ISO is really a crutch. So shutter speed is what you should adjust first to control the light. So if we go into this here, you'll see if I tap on the shutter speed, I also have an auto exposure option. And now I could decide to only adjust the shutter, adjust the shutter and the iris if needed, or the iris or aperture first and then shutter. Well, this is basically shutter priority, with auto exposure, or aperture priority. Let's go with shutter here on auto exposure. And as we start to make changes here to ISO, you see that the shutter speed is going to be automatically calculated and it will try to adjust to pull that off correctly. Additionally, if needed, you could take advantage of an auto exposure option here, where it will adjust based upon the lighting conditions as well. You see as the light changed, so did the shutter speed. Shutter is an excellent way to control the lighting in your scene because it controls the light without changing the depth of field or introducing some of the same problems that a high ISO might. Be sure to explore the exposure triangle so you feel comfortable with this concept for properly exposed footage.

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