Camera Pro-Tips

Rolling Shutter

You go to playback your media after your camera test and there's refresh bands that slightly overlay different opacities over your media. Oh no! This means that your frame rate and shutter speed isn't synchronized to some kind of electric lighting – usually appears from CFL bulbs, fluorescent tubes, and other non-continuous lighting sources (like projectors). 

The first thing to try is adjusting your shutter speed (or shutter angle) to see if you can make the bands go away. I recommend checking the media on a larger monitor because sometimes, the bands are harder to notice in an EVF or an on-camera monitor. Some cameras even have extremely fine-tuned shutter settings called "flickerless" and you can enable that feature to really dial it in. 

This is especially critical to check when you're shooting off-speed – say at 120 FPS, you won't see the banding while you're recording, but it might show up in playback. 

Unfortunately, sometimes, you might need to also adjust your frame rate – this is wildly inconvenient for all the reasons. 

On rare occasions, it is not possible to fully eliminate flicker and rolling bands, so do your best to minimize it and do a quick repair check on a computer. 

Rolling Shutter Repair in Post-Production

Thankfully, the bands that are harder to see on an EVF are easier to fix in post.

Alternatively, if you're wrapped and can't re-shoot, you can try to fix this with Flicker Free. It doesn't always work, but solves rolling shutter issues in many situations. 

Really gnarly banding is a lot harder to fix.