Rolling Shutter and Vibration - a demonstration
 

http://www.mdma.tv/ex1/cmos_vibration.html

This is from the deck of a largish boat (two deck pleasure cruiser sort of thing), with the camera on a tripod at the rear in close proximity to the diesel engines.

I wouldn't normally shoot a set up like this, but it was an opportunity to demonstrate rolling shutter effects if exposed to vibration. Neither do I think it would have worked with a CCD chip - it may have looked 'chattery' rather than 'oscillating'.

Either way, just an illustration of the dangers of vibration.

Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if it's also part of that your shooting with 1/500th ?

Why don't You use the ND Filters to knock light down ?

Maybe it would be that bad then ? I am not shure ...

Peter

I think this could be put to good use when shooting PoV's for "over the limit" pleasureboat captains ;-)

George/

Okay, so I'm holding my hands up - I was shooting this particular set up intentionally to make things look bad, as part of my guerilla campaign to demonstrate that the perceived demons that posses the EX1 aren't as bad as everyone makes out.

I was on ND2 already. I was at f5.6 and could have stopped down more, but the sky was dull and brightening, so I reckoned on needing to go to f8. Barcelona in July is BRIGHT!

I did not have a matte box to hand. A couple of NDs on top of the 1/64 in the camera would have helped.

DIRTY SECRET:
The producer had booked the boat trip (the shoot was mostly hotel GVs and interviews - we wanted 'something else' too) and wanted something from it in the programme. The sea was quite choppy and I didn't think I could get a steady wide shot. I was shooting at a very high shutter speed as I thought the hand-held and tripod shots wouldn't work for my edit. At least with the fastest shutter I could get, I'd have a few stills I could chop together as a montage.

There. I've said it. <blush>

I'll post another couple of shots later which show skewing during fast pan shots. Don't want to spoil the surprise too much, but like the flash shots, it takes a lot to make the camera produce sick results.

I had problems with vibration shooting with a Canon XL1s on a diesel-powered fishing boat. The result was unusable so I had to take the camera off the tripod and shoot handheld.

That's exactly the way the world looks to me when I'm on a small boat and get seasick! ;)

This is a slomo-shot, isn't it?

I liked it. Better than a chattering shot. Looks like a "feature" not a "fault"!

Seriously though, It is interesting - do you think a lower shutter speed would have made any difference?

Lenny Levy

An interesting shot: not only the vibration from the engine, but individual movement of the two boats, each in three planes all helped to make me feel quite seasick! I have had similar problems on board a Thames motor cruiser using a Z1, but as Matt said, the image was more chatter-like. Hand holding the camera with its strap around my neck virtually solved the problem.

Geoff

Question for Matt: Was the Image Stabilization turned on during this clip? If it was, I wonder if this was a result of the EX1 trying to stabilize the movement of the boat as well as the vibration? These two motions combined might have driven the thing crazy.

Yes it was, but that wasn't the problem (all the distortion happens within each frame) and I have plenty of other scenes where Image Stabilisation saved the shot rather than made it bad. OTOH, I will check again for when OIS causes the occasional dark corner - something that the Z1 is guilty of too.

I'm hoping to get permission to use a few other shots from this sequence (i.e. shots that made it to the first round of selects rather than off-cuts) to show how it isn't all bad.

Thanks for posting. I get the same with my hv20. Only it doesn't hurt as much knowing what I could have paid to watch that effect. Seems like a spectacular camera otherwise.