Rolling shutter RUINS your photos & video: Let's fix it!

Tony Northrup teaches you about rolling shutter in this tutorial. Rolling shutter is a limitation of modern photography and video cameras that causes flickering, distortion of moving subjects, and tilting lines in panning shots. He teaches you about sensor readout speeds and how they vary for both electronic and mechanical shutters.

[BackFocus]

Need to pressure the industry to work harder on development of affordable global shutter sensors!

[EJohnDanton]

Back in the day, as my Mum was an avid Royal watcher, when Charles and Diana wed, she wanted photos off the TV.

I had to lower the shutter speed to 1/30 to prevent the flickering. The results were, well, OK for the time and my Mum got photos that her friends oohed and aahed over for days.

My first commission at 16 :)

[garrettsmith]

As a portrait, family, maternity, and newborn photographer I’ve never had an issue with rolling shutter but definitely glad to know these tips in case I do!

[ivanosski]

This is the kind of videos i like the channel for. I'm tired of gear videos. You are great teacher Tony.

[gregfaris]

The rolling shutter distortion is time-domain aliasing, and as you would expect with sample-rate aliasing it is subject to the Shannon/Nyquist theorem, requiring a sample rate of 2x the event rate in order to eliminate the aliasing.

What’s subtle here, and what is so well explained in the video, is that the sample rate here is not the shutter speed, but the total sensor readout speed. The “shutter speed” is the effective exposure time for any given band of the sensor, and will have an effect on motion blur, but the anti-aliasing speed needed to eliminate aliasing distortion is the total readout speed for the whole sensor. Thus, if the hummingbird flaps its little wings at 50Hz, a total readout speed of 100Hz is the minimum required to capture it without aliasing and thus motion artefacts. Anything less WILL produce these unwanted effects.

Again, this is not the shutter speed we typically think of to “freeze” motion. That’s a different thing, based on arc-seconds of movement, and will differ according to magnification, viewing distance and a few subjective values for what we consider to be “sharp”. In many cases, some image blur is not only acceptable, but even desirable, and freeze-motion shots of things we know to be moving quickly may have an unnatural feel.

Lest we imagine these artefacts to be something new in the digital world, we need look no further than the photos produced by Jacques Henri Lartigue, of the Grand Prix race in 1913. Using a camera with a curtain-type focal plane shutter, Lartigue produced famous photos of racecars with oval wheels, surprising many observers at the time.

What shutter produces NO artefacts? The best shutters for air-to-air photographs, where there are usually spinning propellers or rotors, are between-the-lens, leaf shutters. This type of shutter produces no artefacts of any type. Granted, they are not very fast by today’s standard (usually maxing out at 1/500 sec/2ms) but the motion blur produced is usually more desirable anyway for propellers, and it is possible to calculate shutter speeds to produce ¼, ½, or a full rotation of blur. I use large-format film cameras for air-to-air when possible, for this reason. I have yet to see between-the-lens shutters offered for digital cameras, but I would not be surprised to see them offered soon, as more photographers wish to have this artistic control over motion artefacts.

[michaelripple]

Excellent explanation I always heard the term 1 million times but never exactly knew what it was

[martinsillen]

You don’t need an A1 or R3 to get less rolling shutter in silent mode. You can buy the much cheaper a9 and get fast sensor readout. Fast FF sensor has been around 4 years.

[TheDroneAngle]

Best explanation I've heard of rolling shutter. Now, I think I understand it.

[draganbalzic]

Try doing pans with a film camera with a horizontal traveling shutter (Nikon F3) and then do the same shots with a camera with a vertically traveling shutter (Nikon FM2). Critical analysis of the images will show two very different types of distortion.

[dianthus]

I hadn't concerned myself with this issue since I shoot still images of mostly non-moving subjects such as buildings. But then I was surprised using the older Fujifilm X-A5 which does take great photos. I shot some street scenes on a bright day using a very fast shutter speed with the electronic shutter. Without even realising it, I'd moved the camera and got very sharp but wonky-looking tilted or even wavy vertical lines of buildings. At least some of the more recent sensors in Fujifilm cameras perform quite a bit better. But being aware of the problem is a large part of learning how to reduce or eliminate it.

[balamina]

hank you so much Tony! Really I needed to learn about the rolling shutter and you taught it very well and in details! Good luck!

[Xingqiwu]

Excellent presentation and analysis! Thank you so much for clearing up this somewhat arcane subject.

[TroupeGoal]

I'm glad to finally know what people who always talk about this problem actually is, but I suspect I'm so used to seeing it that I'm not too concerned about it

[stuartmeador]

Thanks for the tips... Helps us understand why most electronic flash photography is discouraged with electronic shutter use.

[faisalsheraz]

One of the best explanations I have seen about rolling shutter issues...

[cfsrueda]

As a sports photographer I’ve noticed that when I shoot soccer at night, The R6 is great but sometimes you can notice this problem in moving subjects

[kevinwang]

Shooting stringed instruments with rolling shutter actually looks pretty cool :D

[charlesovatar]

I was shooting a wedding. I was behind the priest and decided to change to silent mode with my Sony a7r4. It was dim. I honestly thought it was the camera screen when checking my photos. When I came back home the banding was terrible. I couldn't find a solution on how to fix them. There was a link that said it can fix banding on raw files. It still doesn't work. So I had to manually fix the photos by photoshop. Using rectangle too with feather 20px ., and use the curves to adjust the dark bandings to match the light ones. It doesn't look 100% , but still better by around 60%.

[ickledotco]

Hello Tony, I notice it most with a fast moving rugby ball, either falling from the sky or a split second after it’s been kicked. I have the mechanical-electronic shutter dilemma your excellent video described and haven’t really found a solution. Thank you.

[angelfoto]

We can make sensor with simultaneously reading and in fact we did a lot back them, it was called CCD. The JFET-LBCAST sensor had really fast speed reading too.