Starving Artistry

Video Prep – Motion Strobe

// January 5th, 2009 // Video

Well, Orange Line is in the recording studio, so I’m gearing up to shoot a video for one of our three songs. I do want to get a newer better video camera, but the model I want doesn’t even come out until summer, so I have to make do with the camera I have.

So above I’ve shared a snippet of a Foo Fighters DVD. I actually got the Blu Ray for xmas, and it was really awesome. What I noticed is that the footage looked a little choppy. Kind of like that opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan? Anyway, it adds a lot of energy to the show. You can kinda see it on the youtube version but it’s very obvious on the blu ray that I have.

At first I thought it was just filmed at a different frame rate or something, but upon consulting with video guru Matt Killmon, I discovered that it was actually just regular film shot at a very high shutter rate.

The shutter rate is how quickly the shutter of the camera closes. The faster it goes, the quicker it captures the image. If it goes very fast, it eliminates motion blur which basically gives this choppy effect that we see. So, if I want that effect in our music video during the band rock-out scenes, all I have to do is change the shutter rate on my lil’ camcorder and then shoot and voila, “motion strobe.”

Too bad I can’t control shutter speed on my camcorder. However, it does film in slow motion. By filming in slow motion, it bumps up from filming at 30 frames / sec to 120 frames / sec. So, the footage itself is 4x slower. Along with the faster frame rate comes the faster shutter speed, so if i speed the slow motion back up to 30 (or 24) frames / sec, I should get that motion strobe look. So, I did a test of speeding some slow motion footage back up. Check it (aspect ratio is messed up…):

But for some reason when I speed it back up, it almost looks faster than normal speed. What’s up with that? I tried it again telling Premiere that the footage was 105 fps instead of 120, so it looks a little slower. Looks more real-time, but mathematically it shouldn’t be:

Anyway, looks pretty good I think. Now there are three issues:

1) Faster shutter speed = More lighting
2) My Sony camcorder can only record 3 seconds at a time at this frame rate
3) Recording at this frame rate isn’t HD… in fact, it’s barely SD. Maybe really good lighting will fix that.

Still have some more tests to try out, but it’s moving along in the right direction.