Why Do People Still Shoot at 24FPS? It always ruins the footage for me

[Jay60p]

3 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

60p looks weird. People say it looks like real life but I don't agree. My eyes see motion blur if I wave my hand quickly. 

30p does make panning smoother unless you pan really slow then 24p is fine. I'd be hard pressed to see a difference between 30p and 24p outside of panning. 

Yes, the waving the hand before your face test! I’ve done that with the X-T3 at 60p to see
what shutter speed mimics reality the best.

And the 180 degree “rule” fails completely here, the motion is too stroboscopic at 1/120th.
60p at 1/60th shutter works for me. It looks most like my real hand waving before my eyes as far as
motion blur is concerned. There are no small increments of time left out at that setting.
Just like seeing with the naked eye. Thats how I shoot at home.

But that’s not what we want for narrative story telling.
We want to be immersed in an alternate reality, and for us right now 24p works best for that.

And 16fps still works fine for Buster Keaton.

I find these frame speed opinions fascinating, its all about how the mind/brain works,
and our cultural training & history. If Hollywood had developed a 48fps standard, who would
want to shoot 24p? It wouldn’t look like Cinema!
Maybe we are all brainwashed by the mechanical & financial limitations of a small group
Of engineers over a hundred years ago.

 

[herein2020]

I think as others have stated...maybe its not the 24FPS that is the problem its the content creators not putting in the additional work needed to make it work. I think because 24FPS is at the edge of what we perceive as smooth motion, if the shutter speed is not right, if the panning is too fast, if the clip was not properly conformed to the timeline, if it was shot at a higher framerate and not slowed down by the proper percentage...etc. it will appear to stutter more so than 30FPS.

30FPS give you 6 or 8 more frames to screw up before it stutters, and the math is simpler when shooting at 60FPS then slowing the footage down by 50%. Just my opinion but I still think all of the extra work needed to ensure 24FPS looks good in the final product simply isn't worth the motion blur that I think most people won't notice anyway when it comes to YouTube / Vimeo content. Hollywood, high paying commercial work, etc. has the budgets to justify the extra time/attention/work needed to put it all together but I know in my own case; not one of my clients has ever said the final project didn't have the motion blur that they expected. Maybe if I had the chance to work on more "cinematic" or "creative" projects I would feel differently but for the work I do (fashion, modeling, events, real estate, music videos, weddings, etc) 30FPS is the better fit.

[fuzzynormal]

2 hours ago, herein2020 said:

Maybe if I had the chance to work on more "cinematic" or "creative" projects I would feel differently

Years ago I committed to making a doc on a GX7 and GM1 with 23.97 and SS 1/30.  Was a little unsure (even with my pre-pro tests) but became so enamored with the look it's pretty much my default settings for all things creative I do.

I have a narrative filmmaking colleague that committed himself to 29.97 fps and the 180 rule of a SS @ 1/60.  I hate the look.  His films appear like a video abomination to my eye.  He unfortunately also shoots like a videographer not a cinematographer, which is a shame too, but I digress... Worse, the reason he does 29.97 now is because he misunderstood a basic conforming projection error that he made for one of his films over a decade ago.  He now can't be talked out of 29.97.  Gah.  

Not that 29.97 if a bad idea for some things.  Still, even my corporate stuff when I shoot 29.97 is often with a SS of 1/40.  Something about the "long blur" that reads better to my eye than regular crispy digital video.

So, slower shutter is just a thing I do in order to make the videos I deliver a little bit visually unique.  With everyone shooting vids on their phone these days they're  creating a certain high-shutter/high-frame-rate visual standard by attrition...I just don't want my work to look like that.

And I also think you're assumption is correct, most stuttering artifacts are simply user error with shutter speeds --and improper conforming during editing.  24fps handled properly, to my eye, looks elegant and smooth.

At the end of the day it depends on what you like.  The video gaming young'uns dig the fast frame rates.  Who's to say they're necessarily wrong?

[TomTheDP]

5 hours ago, Jay60p said:

Yes, the waving the hand before your face test! I’ve done that with the X-T3 at 60p to see
what shutter speed mimics reality the best.

And the 180 degree “rule” fails completely here, the motion is too stroboscopic at 1/120th.
60p at 1/60th shutter works for me. It looks most like my real hand waving before my eyes as far as
motion blur is concerned. There are no small increments of time left out at that setting.
Just like seeing with the naked eye. Thats how I shoot at home.

But that’s not what we want for narrative story telling.
We want to be immersed in an alternate reality, and for us right now 24p works best for that.

And 16fps still works fine for Buster Keaton.

I find these frame speed opinions fascinating, its all about how the mind/brain works,
and our cultural training & history. If Hollywood had developed a 48fps standard, who would
want to shoot 24p? It wouldn’t look like Cinema!
Maybe we are all brainwashed by the mechanical & financial limitations of a small group
Of engineers over a hundred years ago.

 

I guess its more about motion blur than framerate. I haven't shot much at 60p with 60 shutter.

[kye]

8 hours ago, Jay60p said:

Yes, the waving the hand before your face test! I’ve done that with the X-T3 at 60p to see
what shutter speed mimics reality the best.

And the 180 degree “rule” fails completely here, the motion is too stroboscopic at 1/120th.
60p at 1/60th shutter works for me. It looks most like my real hand waving before my eyes as far as
motion blur is concerned. There are no small increments of time left out at that setting.
Just like seeing with the naked eye. Thats how I shoot at home.

But that’s not what we want for narrative story telling.
We want to be immersed in an alternate reality, and for us right now 24p works best for that.

And 16fps still works fine for Buster Keaton.

I find these frame speed opinions fascinating, its all about how the mind/brain works,
and our cultural training & history. If Hollywood had developed a 48fps standard, who would
want to shoot 24p? It wouldn’t look like Cinema!
Maybe we are all brainwashed by the mechanical & financial limitations of a small group
Of engineers over a hundred years ago.

 

Human vision is fundamentally different to the way that video works, so there is no frame-rate & shutter angle combination that makes sense.

To expand on this, imagine you have a fan with only one fan blade, and imagine that it's spinning quite quickly.  We would see the fan blade as a blur between (let's say) the 12-oclock position and the 6-oclock position.  Then a tiny bit of time passes, and now we see the fan blade as a blur between 1-oclock and 7-oclock.  etc.  

To put it into traditional video terms, the shutter angle is much much more than a 360 degree shutter.

There have been attempts to actually simulate this.  They filmed scenes with a very high frame rate and using a 360 shutter, and then you can combine many frames together, let's say that output frame #1 has capture frames 1-100, then output frame #2 has capture frames 11-110, etc.  In this way, you can have a shutter angle that is larger than 360 degrees.

You could also do things like have the motion blur be a fade rather than all parts of the motion blur be the same.

I think this might be what we're running into when we talk about 24p vs 60p.  Maybe 24p has the right motion-blur, but 60p has the right refresh rate, but can't have a shutter angle more than 360 degrees.  I believe that computer games have worked out that the human eye can't detect anything more than a certain frame rate, ie, 120fps or 240fps or something, so in that instance there's no point rendering a game at faster than that.  So what we need is a frame rate at that pace, but with motion blur around 1/50th of a second (corresponding to 24p 180 shutter) which with current technology isn't possible.

Thus, the 24p 60p debate will never be resolved because the technology isn't the right kind of design.

5 hours ago, herein2020 said:

I think as others have stated...maybe its not the 24FPS that is the problem its the content creators not putting in the additional work needed to make it work.

Actually, it's that 24p is a problem because people who do video use equipment designed for computer gaming, but don't know that that's what they're doing.  Do you recall my earlier post where I said that film-making is deceptively simple and that people don't know what they don't know?  This is one of the things I was talking about.

There's no real effort required to get great 24p - just buy equipment designed for film-making and not for computer games.  There are a huge number of external display adapters that are available for purchase, and they're very affordable too.

BlackMagic sells a bunch of them here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products including the Decklink which is $145 for 1080p and $195 for the 4K version.  I suspect these only work with Resolve, but there would be others that work with other NLEs.  These will also give you support for 10-bit, HDR, and SDI if you have SDI monitoring equipment, and perhaps best of all is that they are a completely managed colour pipeline, so the operating system and display drivers and all the crap can't stuff up your colour calibration, giving you a completely calibrated display to work from.  
Most monitors will happily display a 1080 or 4K signal at 24p if that's what the hardware is giving them, so all you need is one of these interfaces and all the problems you're facing will go away.

You could make the argument that this gives you a great 24p pipeline but it doesn't solve it for everyone viewing your videos, and that's true.  For them, it will be a mixture of watching on computers designed for gaming, phones, and smart TVs.  People watching on computers probably aren't going to have good 24p playback, but as has already been mentioned, will they even notice?  I'm not sure about phones, but smart TVs may do this happily, considering they're designed for media consumption, not for gaming, but it might well be a patchy.  I remember setting up my media boxes to be PAL and not NTSC (before I had a completely smart TV) so they were definitely broadcast focused rather than PC/gaming mentality.

Also, you'd be surprised at how many people can spot the 50p "soap opera effect".  I doubt that many would spot the difference between 24p and 30p, but you never know.  If you ever sort out your equipment to give you proper 24p (or 25p)  playback you could test your friends and family and see if they can tell.  You might be surprised.

[SteveV4D]

10 hours ago, kye said:

BlackMagic sells a bunch of them here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products including the Decklink which is $145 for 1080p and $195 for the 4K version.  I suspect these only work with Resolve, but there would be others that work with other NLEs.  

I have the 4K decklink card and I can also output through it when using Premiere.  At the time I got it, Resolve couldn't give you a full screen output to another monitor without purchasing the decklink.  They have since added that, but the decklink still gives great 24p playback to my 3rd monitor.

[Jay60p]

13 hours ago, kye said:

Human vision is fundamentally different to the way that video works, so there is no frame-rate & shutter angle combination that makes sense.

Let me ask this another way.

Let’s assume 24p looks fine on the right equipment and has the classic cinema look when shot
Correctly.

But what if you were given the job of providing a video, with only your GH5,
that most closely matches real world human vision? I don’t expect perfection here.
Say for instance, you are asked to provide a video projection used in a
Disneyworld simulation ride, where It needs to appear “real”.

(In the ‘80s, Douglas Trumbull’s famous answer to this question was Showscan, now obsolete.)

I am talking about deciding between the usual 30p to 60p and the shutter speeds
that we have right now.

Also lets assume our displays are limited to 60hz, like both my own TV and projector.

If your answer is different from my 60p at 1/60th I would find that interesting.

[kye]

3 minutes ago, Jay60p said:

Let me ask this another way.

Let’s assume 24p looks fine on the right equipment and has the classic cinema look when shot
Correctly.

But what if you were given the job of providing a video, with only your GH5,
that most closely matches real world human vision? I don’t expect perfection here.
Say for instance, you are asked to provide a video projection used in a
Disneyworld simulation ride, where It needs to appear “real”.

(In the ‘80s, Douglas Trumbull’s famous answer to this question was Showscan, now obsolete.)

I am talking about deciding between the usual 30p to 60p and the shutter speeds
that we have right now.

Also lets assume our displays are limited to 60hz, like both my own TV and projector.

If your answer is different from my 60p at 1/60th I would find that interesting.

My first answer would be "find someone else to do this".  

My second answer would be "no really, I'm not the person for this task".

My third answer would be 60p 360 shutter.  But that's only because you said that the displays are limited to 60p.  If I had access to a 24-240fps display that could do any frame rate in-between then I would test the 1080p VFR mode at 24/30/60/90/120 and 180fps.  I would then downscale the whole lot to SD in order to eliminate the fact that the slower frame rates have more data per pixel than the higher frame rates.  
Based on that I would then look at the resolution/framerate/bitrate combinations that the camera could offer, and work out how to choose between them, shoot identical test materials, and do a blind test with an audience to determine which mode to use.

Of course, it's a ridiculous question, along the lines of "if you needed to paint the ceiling but only had a drawer of cutlery to apply the paint, which utensil would you choose, and by the way you're limited to only a fork or spoon".

[Jay60p]

You wrote a long response to my earlier post and I see now
it looks like I dismissed it in my answer.
Actually I read it through several times. It contained quite a bit I never heard of.
Obviously you’ve been down many rabbit holes before I started with mirrorless,
and I’m happy to read your reports on them. I know the
frustration of getting stuck in one, I no longer have any stomach for them myself.

I know how much time you’ve devoted to 24p, and I assumed you
would have an opinion on a shutter speed for 60p.
If you never shoot 60p and don’t like it at any shutter speed,
sorry that I was forcing the issue.
I never got that impression from your posts. Did I miss it? My bad.

Anyway, no point in arguing. Not important.
To each his own.

[fuzzynormal]

14 hours ago, Jay60p said:

providing a video that most closely matches real world human vision?

As you say, 60fps, shutter speed of 60.

[kye]

16 hours ago, Jay60p said:

You wrote a long response to my earlier post and I see now
it looks like I dismissed it in my answer.
Actually I read it through several times. It contained quite a bit I never heard of.
Obviously you’ve been down many rabbit holes before I started with mirrorless,
and I’m happy to read your reports on them. I know the
frustration of getting stuck in one, I no longer have any stomach for them myself.

I know how much time you’ve devoted to 24p, and I assumed you
would have an opinion on a shutter speed for 60p.
If you never shoot 60p and don’t like it at any shutter speed,
sorry that I was forcing the issue.
I never got that impression from your posts. Did I miss it? My bad.

Anyway, no point in arguing. Not important.
To each his own.

No offence taken!  

I've played with shutter angle and waving my hand on front of my face and I've gotten a sense of how 24p is different to reality.  The subjective experience for me is that 24p has a 'look' which is made to look the least un-natural by having a shutter angle somewhere in the 120-240 degree range, depending on your mood and if it's dark etc.  

But the thing is that 60p doesn't look more neutral to me, it looks like it has about the same amount of a 'look' in comparison to reality that 24p does, but the aesthetic of that look is very different.  

24p seems to have a kind of 'heightened sense' aesthetic, like realty can have in moments of strong emotion.  Kind of like the visual component of "time slowed down" and in a sense it's an effect that kind of increases the romance and emotion and depth and pain and very texture of experiencing the world as an emotional animal.  

60p has an aesthetic that makes reality seem like every atom has been lubricated and everything is kind of slipping all over itself, kind of like everything is falling in slow-motion except that it's doing it at the speed of reality, and perhaps a little bit too fast for comfort.  It has an aesthetic like the love child of slipping over in the bath, being scammed by a con artist that was so good the only warning that you got was that everything was happening slightly too easily, and what I imagine it would be like taking pills that make you smarter and give you superhero reflexes.

In my mind, 24p has a more relatable aesthetic, it fits with things that I occasionally experience in my sober real-life, but it's also familiar from watching movies and TV, so that's an advantage too.  60p has an aesthetic that I have never experienced in sober real-life.  24p disappears but 60p never seems to fade-away into the background, it's like I've had my brain downloaded into a robot body and somehow they got the code wrong.

My answer to your question about what to film for a simulation ride was 60p, but not because it mimics reality, but for two reasons - the first is that in motion-simulations it's been shown that lower frame rates make people nauseous and that it doesn't look like reality or like 24p.  So people would come out of the ride having kept their lunch and having had an experience that they'd say "wow, it really was an experience" rather than say "I watched a movie and the seat moved".

Talking about frame rate and shutter angle to mimic reality is like talking about drawing with crayons to mimic a moving sculpture - there's enough similarity to make it seem reasonable to ask the question but only good enough to choose between fundamental challenges that cannot all be met.

[Jay60p]

3 hours ago, kye said:

No offence taken!  

I've played with shutter angle and waving my hand on front of my face and I've gotten a sense of how 24p is different to reality.  The subjective experience for me is that 24p has a 'look' which is made to look the least un-natural by having a shutter angle somewhere in the 120-240 degree range, depending on your mood and if it's dark etc.  

But the thing is that 60p doesn't look more neutral to me, it looks like it has about the same amount of a 'look' in comparison to reality that 24p does, but the aesthetic of that look is very different.  

24p seems to have a kind of 'heightened sense' aesthetic, like realty can have in moments of strong emotion.  Kind of like the visual component of "time slowed down" and in a sense it's an effect that kind of increases the romance and emotion and depth and pain and very texture of experiencing the world as an emotional animal.  

60p has an aesthetic that makes reality seem like every atom has been lubricated and everything is kind of slipping all over itself, kind of like everything is falling in slow-motion except that it's doing it at the speed of reality, and perhaps a little bit too fast for comfort.  It has an aesthetic like the love child of slipping over in the bath, being scammed by a con artist that was so good the only warning that you got was that everything was happening slightly too easily, and what I imagine it would be like taking pills that make you smarter and give you superhero reflexes.

In my mind, 24p has a more relatable aesthetic, it fits with things that I occasionally experience in my sober real-life, but it's also familiar from watching movies and TV, so that's an advantage too.  60p has an aesthetic that I have never experienced in sober real-life.  24p disappears but 60p never seems to fade-away into the background, it's like I've had my brain downloaded into a robot body and somehow they got the code wrong.

My answer to your question about what to film for a simulation ride was 60p, but not because it mimics reality, but for two reasons - the first is that in motion-simulations it's been shown that lower frame rates make people nauseous and that it doesn't look like reality or like 24p.  So people would come out of the ride having kept their lunch and having had an experience that they'd say "wow, it really was an experience" rather than say "I watched a movie and the seat moved".

Talking about frame rate and shutter angle to mimic reality is like talking about drawing with crayons to mimic a moving sculpture - there's enough similarity to make it seem reasonable to ask the question but only good enough to choose between fundamental challenges that cannot all be met.

Excellent post. Always good to understand how different our experience can be.

I have done X-T3 24p experimentation, camera on tripod, shooting classic Hollywood style.
So stationary shots, no zooms, only panning to follow a moving subject. The results look fine in these conditions. I would have no problem shooting a drama like this.

But usually shooting at home, I need to pan & walk around, hand held. What bothers me most with 24p is panning from one POV to another without a moving subject for the eye to lock on. Even in the theater or Blu-ray playback, this kind of pan bothers me. In 60p it is smooth enough that I can pan, or walk, as fast or slow as I want.

Two years ago I stretched my budget a bit to get a camera that had 60p at 4K. The X-T3 and the GH5 were the two best choices, and back then the GH5 was most expensive. There were less costly choices for 4K at 24 & 30p. Why did you choose the GH5 for 24p? In the past I automatically assumed GH5 users were paying extra for the 60p also.

[Dude_ger]

On 1/26/2021 at 1:34 AM, herein2020 said:

. I will assume that if my TV was set to PAL and the frame rate was 25FPS it would look the same to my eyes as my TV set to NTSC and the frame rate set to 30FPS. 

Let me interrupt you here, sir. No. No, no. ;)
If you ever have the chance to watch PAL TV, do it. It will  have the same effect as switching from sd to hd ;)
I am wondering if the Americans also are used to the Never The Same Color phrase.

[kye]

7 hours ago, Jay60p said:

Excellent post. Always good to understand how different our experience can be.

I have done X-T3 24p experimentation, camera on tripod, shooting classic Hollywood style.
So stationary shots, no zooms, only panning to follow a moving subject. The results look fine in these conditions. I would have no problem shooting a drama like this.

But usually shooting at home, I need to pan & walk around, hand held. What bothers me most with 24p is panning from one POV to another without a moving subject for the eye to lock on. Even in the theater or Blu-ray playback, this kind of pan bothers me. In 60p it is smooth enough that I can pan, or walk, as fast or slow as I want.

Two years ago I stretched my budget a bit to get a camera that had 60p at 4K. The X-T3 and the GH5 were the two best choices, and back then the GH5 was most expensive. There were less costly choices for 4K at 24 & 30p. Why did you choose the GH5 for 24p? In the past I automatically assumed GH5 users were paying extra for the 60p also.

I shoot handheld and don't have problems with pans without a subject, but they're not really a big part of what I shoot, especially now I have a 15mm equivalent lens, so landscapes etc don't require that much panning.
The issue with 24p panning is that the 180 shutter obscures the detail, but that doesn't bother me as I'm shooting with auto-SS for exposure, so normally very short shutter speeds.  I'm aware it makes the video less cinematic, but not having to use an ND means I get about 20-30% more usable shots, considering that much of the time I see something happening and only just get the camera going and in focus, and in the edit I end up using the first 2-3 seconds of the clip, so if I had to manually expose with an ND then I would have missed the moment.

I chose the GH5 because of the 10-bit internal and IBIS.  Even now, if I was re-buying my whole setup I would still consider the GH5 as the best option due to the 200Mbps 422 ALL-I 1080p 24p and 60p modes downscaled from 5K, the IBIS, the fact it's much lighter than things like the S1H, the fact I manually focus so don't care about AF, and the MFT crop factor gives me a 2X zoom on long lenses which I use for filming sports in the 120p mode.
Is it the best camera available, no.  Is it a camera with only 4K60 as its only defining factor?  No way.  It is still considered a workhorse today, and the GH5 FB group I'm in has 37k+ members and has a steady stream of people buying a GH5 for the first time and asking questions as they familiarise themselves with the camera, or asking advice about buying GH5/GH5s as a second or third camera for their setups.  The group is interesting in that it seems to be full of people who are shooting things, posting their work, and are still very excited about the benefits that it provides.

[Jay60p]

4 hours ago, kye said:

The issue with 24p panning is that the 180 shutter obscures the detail, but that doesn't bother me as I'm shooting with auto-SS for exposure, so normally very short shutter speeds.  I'm aware it makes the video less cinematic, but not having to use an ND means I get about 20-30% more usable shots, considering that much of the time I see something happening and only just get the camera going and in focus, and in the edit I end up using the first 2-3 seconds of the clip, so if I had to manually expose with an ND then I would have missed the moment.

30fps would help a little for lowering outdoor exposures. Do you see a difference between 24 & 30 motion?

Outdoors I use a polarizer, I want the blue sky and foliage colors it gives plus it lowers exposure. On top of that at 60p I will go from 1/60 to 1/80 or 1/96 sec if needed, so I also never needed to use a ND. I do have a graduated ND filter that will darken just the sky, but rarely think to use it.

 

 

[Jay60p]

On 1/26/2021 at 2:31 AM, herein2020 said:

 

 

 

 

I downloaded that video "Canon Beach Cinematic" to play in quicktime player a frame at a time.
That one shot at 0:28 plays 4 frames then skips the 5th.
That would happen with a 30p shot edited on a 24p timeline,
Subtract 1/5th of 30 and you get 24.
The jitter you see is the little jump at every (dropped) 5th frame.
The rest are 24p frames rendered at 24fps so look fine.

(I like to use ClipGrab on Mac for downloading youtube video,
it is not a browser plugin, it is an app that runs on its own.)

[kye]

18 hours ago, Jay60p said:

30fps would help a little for lowering outdoor exposures. Do you see a difference between 24 & 30 motion?

Outdoors I use a polarizer, I want the blue sky and foliage colors it gives plus it lowers exposure. On top of that at 60p I will go from 1/60 to 1/80 or 1/96 sec if needed, so I also never needed to use a ND. I do have a graduated ND filter that will darken just the sky, but rarely think to use it.

I don't see a difference between 24p and 30p.  Or at least, 30p doesn't have the same look that 60p has to me.

I figure the only way to get SS you want is by having an ND.  You can have a variable ND or you can use fixed NDs and then vary your aperture (assuming it's declicked) to fine tune it.  The reason I say that is because there is very little tolerance for variations in SS if you want some motion blur in the frame.

To put it in context, let's say you're aiming for 180 degree shutter.  Obviously a 170 degree shutter would still be fine, but where are the boundaries of the aesthetic.  Some say that 360 shutter gives too much blur, but let's say that we're ok with it.  Steven Spielberg famously used a 45degree shutter on Saving Private Ryan because he wanted the aesthetic to be jarring and he wanted the audience to be able to see the bits of peoples bodies splattering everywhere when things exploded.  Let's say you don't want to go this far and so a 90 degree shutter is our limit.  That's a 90-360 shutter.

Take the sunny-16 rule.  For outdoor exposures at ISO 100 you'd typically have a 1/100s exposure when set to f16.  No-one contemplating not using an ND will be wanting to shoot at f16, so let's say they're going to be shooting more like f4.  That's 4 extra stops of light we have to get rid of in the SS, so that's a SS of 1/1600.  

That's a 180 shutter if we're shooting 800fps.  This is absolutely no-where near what we need for 24fps, 30fps, 60fps, or even 120fps, so changing from 24p to 30p because you don't want to use an ND doesn't work.  Using a graduated ND won't take 4 stops off the brightest part of the image, so that does't work.  Polarisers won't work either.  

Maybe you never shoot in bright sunlight, sure.  For me, I realised that I would need NDs that went from something like 6-stops to zero, and even then I'd still need to dial them in every time and miss a bunch of my shots.  So I just abandoned using one.  I used to use a fixed one on my XC10 because it couldn't do a short enough SS to exposure during the day with the aperture wide-open, as it was a cinema camera and not a hybrid.  

I will happily go back to using an ND when they implement a built-in eND that is controlled by the camera automatically like the Sony cinema cameras have.  That way I control the aperture because it's a creative tool, I control the SS because it's a creative tool, and the camera controls the ND and the ISO to get the full range of exposure values, because neither ND nor ISO is a creative tool.

 

[Jay60p]

6 hours ago, kye said:

I don't see a difference between 24p and 30p.  Or at least, 30p doesn't have the same look that 60p has to me.

I figure the only way to get SS you want is by having an ND.  You can have a variable ND or you can use fixed NDs and then vary your aperture (assuming it's declicked) to fine tune it.  The reason I say that is because there is very little tolerance for variations in SS if you want some motion blur in the frame.

To put it in context, let's say you're aiming for 180 degree shutter.  Obviously a 170 degree shutter would still be fine, but where are the boundaries of the aesthetic.  Some say that 360 shutter gives too much blur, but let's say that we're ok with it.  Steven Spielberg famously used a 45degree shutter on Saving Private Ryan because he wanted the aesthetic to be jarring and he wanted the audience to be able to see the bits of peoples bodies splattering everywhere when things exploded.  Let's say you don't want to go this far and so a 90 degree shutter is our limit.  That's a 90-360 shutter.

Take the sunny-16 rule.  For outdoor exposures at ISO 100 you'd typically have a 1/100s exposure when set to f16.  No-one contemplating not using an ND will be wanting to shoot at f16, so let's say they're going to be shooting more like f4.  That's 4 extra stops of light we have to get rid of in the SS, so that's a SS of 1/1600.  

That's a 180 shutter if we're shooting 800fps.  This is absolutely no-where near what we need for 24fps, 30fps, 60fps, or even 120fps, so changing from 24p to 30p because you don't want to use an ND doesn't work.  Using a graduated ND won't take 4 stops off the brightest part of the image, so that does't work.  Polarisers won't work either.  

Maybe you never shoot in bright sunlight, sure.  For me, I realised that I would need NDs that went from something like 6-stops to zero, and even then I'd still need to dial them in every time and miss a bunch of my shots.  So I just abandoned using one.  I used to use a fixed one on my XC10 because it couldn't do a short enough SS to exposure during the day with the aperture wide-open, as it was a cinema camera and not a hybrid.  

I will happily go back to using an ND when they implement a built-in eND that is controlled by the camera automatically like the Sony cinema cameras have.  That way I control the aperture because it's a creative tool, I control the SS because it's a creative tool, and the camera controls the ND and the ISO to get the full range of exposure values, because neither ND nor ISO is a creative tool.

 

I still have the camera files for all of 2020 that I shot from the X-T3.
I checked the metadata in some sunny day shots. The brightest would be the beach shots last summer.

I had set ISO 320, Fuji 10-24 zoom at f9 to f13, shutter speed 1/100 to 1/160 at 60p, and the polarizer measures about a one stop drop. All set manually. There were
A few odd shots like ISO 500 at 1/250th, I probably wasn’t paying attention.
I’m not after soft focus backgrounds so I don’t need f4.

I like the wide angle look.
I wade out Into the water (ocean bay, small waves)
to get shots of the kids, camera low just above the water, around 10 to 20mm.
Got to be quick to avoid getting splashed!

I really love white clouds against deep blue skys and wouldn’t
want to exchange the polarizer for an ND.

The only time I put two filters on one lens is for time-lapse at
very slow shutter speeds, say 1 second per frame, for the classic
motion blur. 

Then I’ll put on two polarizers and spin one to darken way down.
I suppose If I ever had to do f4 in sunlight, I could do the double polarizer thing.

So that is my experience, it’s a different look and it’s not very difficult.

From your new post, I now understand you’re doing shallow DOF at 24p, in sunlight.
Yes, 30p or polarizer don’t do it. Thats a challenge.

[SteveV4D]

I couldn't imagine shooting without a variable ND.  My work is mainly Weddings and requires fast work, but I'm still manual focusing and twisting my variable ND on the go, and I've gotten pretty fast at it. I can't stand to see footage with a fast shutter, and hate it when my drone footage demonstrates it, when the ND filter I put on isn't strong enough for the light.  The effect is that footage can be pin sharp to the point where it can feel weird, especially when shot with 24p.  Not to mention, the tell tail signs of birds making jumps across the sky, rather than showing smooth motion.  Silly things like that can take me out of video I'm watching.

If going for a more documentary type of shooting rather than cinematic, I can understand the attraction for having an easier time when filming.  

Then again, I could have an easier time shooting with my phone over the BM Pocket cameras I use, but the results would be less satisfying to me  partially because of the shutter being high.  That said, I've used my phone to grab some quick shots, but I always hate myself come the edit for being so lazy on the day. 😂😂

[kye]

7 hours ago, Jay60p said:

I still have the camera files for all of 2020 that I shot from the X-T3.
I checked the metadata in some sunny day shots. The brightest would be the beach shots last summer.

I had set ISO 320, Fuji 10-24 zoom at f9 to f13, shutter speed 1/100 to 1/160 at 60p, and the polarizer measures about a one stop drop. All set manually. There were
A few odd shots like ISO 500 at 1/250th, I probably wasn’t paying attention.
I’m not after soft focus backgrounds so I don’t need f4.

I like the wide angle look.
I wade out Into the water (ocean bay, small waves)
to get shots of the kids, camera low just above the water, around 10 to 20mm.
Got to be quick to avoid getting splashed!

I really love white clouds against deep blue skys and wouldn’t
want to exchange the polarizer for an ND.

The only time I put two filters on one lens is for time-lapse at
very slow shutter speeds, say 1 second per frame, for the classic
motion blur. 

Then I’ll put on two polarizers and spin one to darken way down.
I suppose If I ever had to do f4 in sunlight, I could do the double polarizer thing.

So that is my experience, it’s a different look and it’s not very difficult.

From your new post, I now understand you’re doing shallow DOF at 24p, in sunlight.
Yes, 30p or polarizer don’t do it. Thats a challenge.

Cool technique and I can see why you are able to use aperture to set exposure.  Not a lot of folks on this board seem to understand that a lens closes down.

My overall philosophy is 1) get the shot, and 2) make it as 3D as possible.  Making it as 3D as possible explains many / most of the things that are done on controlled big budget sets, and as I don't do some of those things because of (1) I overdo the rest, but just by a little.

I prefer to shoot with a DOF effect similar to my eyes, but just a little shallower in order to help with depth.  Even on bright sunny days we still see blur in backgrounds, so that's how I use the aperture.  In low light I will open up completely and although it's a radical thing with fast lenses, it looks more natural because our eyes naturally open up in low-light conditions so it doesn't seem unnatural.  

I shoot in public in uncontrolled situations so it's nice to be able to separate out the subject from the environment to create focus.  For example:

Excuse the colour grading, they are ungraded or only a quick job.

You can definitely over-do the shallow DoF thing.  Philip Blooms film shot in Greece with the GFX100 had DoF that was too shallow for my tastes, so I'm not a bokeh fiend or anything.

Sometimes you want to take everything in (once again, basically ungraded):

My thoughts about DoF are that it's about the story you want to create.  It's about controlling what the focus of the shot is.  Sometimes the situations are so crowded that frames would be chaos and it's difficult to tell who the subject is or know where you're meant to be looking.  Obviously that's the main job of composition, and to an extent DoF is about how 'deep' your composition is.  Very shallow DoF says "that other stuff back there isn't important" and deep DoF says "everything here is important".

It's a creative tool, which is why I don't want to be forced to use it to control exposure.

25 minutes ago, SteveV4D said:

I couldn't imagine shooting without a variable ND.  My work is mainly Weddings and requires fast work, but I'm still manual focusing and twisting my variable ND on the go, and I've gotten pretty fast at it. I can't stand to see footage with a fast shutter, and hate it when my drone footage demonstrates it, when the ND filter I put on isn't strong enough for the light.  The effect is that footage can be pin sharp to the point where it can feel weird, especially when shot with 24p.  Not to mention, the tell tail signs of birds making jumps across the sky, rather than showing smooth motion.  Silly things like that can take me out of video I'm watching.

If going for a more documentary type of shooting rather than cinematic, I can understand the attraction for having an easier time when filming.  

Then again, I could have an easier time shooting with my phone over the BM Pocket cameras I use, but the results would be less satisfying to me  partially because of the shutter being high.  That said, I've used my phone to grab some quick shots, but I always hate myself come the edit for being so lazy on the day. 😂😂

Exposing with SS isn't my preferred aesthetic, but the number of times that I only just get a shot of the kids doing something funny means that shaving every second off the reaction time really counts.

I've even taken the first two frames of a shot (or the first two in focus) and used Optical Flow to create a kind of moving snapshot of the moment, and did that because frame #3 of the clip showed the smiles fading or the kids noticing the camera or something else coming into play and the moment is clearly gone.  Literally, I got the shot but had I been 0.08s later, I'd have missed it.  This has happened more times than I can count and often they're the best moments.  

I don't know about you, but I can't set a variable ND to correct exposure in under 0.04s.

When a camera uses auto-ISO and auto-eND to set exposure I will set the shutter angle to 270 and leave it there forever.  I say 270 instead of 180 because I slightly overdo the things I can in order to compensate for the things I have no control over, like lighting conditions, or sometimes even my filming location (like if I'm stuck in my seat on a tour bus / boat / etc).