Who’s right? Me or the “professional videographer”?

[Tero Ahlfors]

Depending on the situation/camera/camera settings/someone’s mom it can be a combination of both. Rolling shutter can be manifested in other ways than smearing images during fast movement.

But the actual point that one should learn is: No one cares about camera gear slapfights on the internet.

[Blaise Douros]

No, you’re wrong. This issue is created through an interaction between rolling shutter and a light source that is out of phase with the shutter speed. On a global sensor, this would show up as frame-to-frame flickering, while on a rolling shutter camera, it shows up as these rolling bands.

Also, stop getting into pissing matches. “Professionals” often know what they’re talking about. Like Tyrion Lannister, our job is to drink and know things.

[Blaise Douros]

Looking at that image, though, I’m not even convinced it’s fluorescents. Those bands are so narrow that it looks more like LED PWM cycles than fluoro. And with non-cinema LEDs being so unstandardized, there’s often no sync speed at which they don’t flicker.

Of course, if this was a fully rigged set, that shouldn’t have been an issue, period. But I’ve been in situations shooting doc-style under ambient LED lights, or LED streetlamps, where you can’t set your shutter slow enough to smooth out the artifacts, rolling shutter or not.

The bottom line, though, is that it IS an artifact created by rolling shutter interacting with pulse cycles of a light, whether LED or fluorescent.