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banding in video, but not fluorescent light….it’s in the sky. so….question….
It is very possible that when I was snapping shots of my son on my Canon t2i that I had the shutter speed high because I had the aperture open to something like 2.8 or maybe less.
While we were walking, birds started to fly overhead, so I flipped to movie mode, and started taking video without changing settings.
Now, I know and have read that it is very obvious in fluorescent lights when filming at the wrong shutter speed. Would the same happen filming a blue sky in the sunlight?? Is the shutter speed the key here?
No other video I took had an issue. That being said, I’ve always been conscious of the settings before I started filming. Am I on the right track? So….sunlight also has a certain…er…wavelength to consider?
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2 Replies
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Banding cause by fluorescent light is caused by the refresh rate (Hertz) of the lights interfering with the shutter speed (or theoretical refresh rate of the camera shutter) .
I’m not sure why the sky would do this, since the sky doesn’t (obviously) run off of electrical cycles like electric lights (like fluorescents would)
-Jordan Westhoff
Rochester Institute of Technology
BS Digital Cinema/Motion Picture Science 2015 -
[Dave Andrade] “Would the same happen filming a blue sky in the sunlight?”
No, this is completely different. Regular fluorescent lights have a “pulse” that gives you that ugly black banding if you don’t shoot with a shutter speed to match the frequency rate of the electrical system. So in North America you would always shoot at 1/60 sec, where in Europe you would be shooting at 1/50 sec.
The problem with the blue-sky banding has to do with most DSLRs recording in 8-bit color space, which may not be enough for fine color gradients, like subtle blue-sky colors. Dedicated video cameras will often dither the color range that it can’t store normally, so that banding won’t happen.
With the Panasonic GH2 DLSR their is a very good patch called FlowMotion ver 2.02 by Lee Powell that helps to control banding problems, by actually modifying the algorithm the camera uses to generate it’s 8-bit files.
Short of this, you will have to use a camera that can record in 10-bit color space, which pretty much eliminates all of the low cost cameras. I think the Blackmagic cameras are the cheapest cameras that can record 10-bit color. ( A new $995 Blackmagic Pocket video camera was announced yesterday, that uses the same lens mount as the Panasonic GH2 / GH3 cameras )
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