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If you’ve purchased and been shooting with the Sony A7s, you may have noticed that it has one of the worst rolling shutters ever in a full-frame camera.
It’s so bad, in fact, that it really limits you to making landscape travel videos with a twiddly little music bed that you’ll likely only post on Vimeo—after you color-grade it to look like an Instagram photo, of course.
Well, fortunately, there are ways to reduce the rolling shutter.
Sony A7s Rolling Shutter Reduction Techniques
Shoot In APS-C Mode
The first and most immediate thing you can do, which gives excellent results, is shoot in APS-C mode.
Yes, this does crop your sensor, but it doesn’t really seem to affect image quality. Remember, when shooting HD, you only need 2 megapixels. So cropping that sensor won’t hurt; it will just punch in, making it much more difficult to get an ultra-wide shot.
In comes the Metabones Speedbooster
If you’re shooting with full-frame lenses, you can equip your Sony A7s with a speed booster and get nearly the same field of view with a reduced rolling shutter. There you go!
Use Premiere’s Warp Stabilizer
This filter is in Premieres effects. Just search Stabilize, and you’ll see it: warp stabilizer.
It has a few options to play with and works well for reducing or even completely fixing vibration and rolling the shutter.
However, it’s not always perfect. It can sometimes make your image look bendy and warp if the original image is very bad.
You’ll find it also works better if you shoot on a faster shutter, which goes directly against giving your video that ‘film look.’
Option 3 – You Can Wait
Yes, you can always wait; there will always be something better.
I’ve been shooting videos with the Sony A7r. It’s good, not great, but I’m happy with it.
Sure, it doesn’t have all the great features of the Sony A7s or the low-light capabilities, but it also has a much milder rolling shutter, which I’m comfortable with.
Sony has announced that it will work on reducing the rolling shutter in its CMOS full-frame cameras. So my bet is the Sony A7s 2, which will probably be called the A8 or A77 or something, will likely have a much improved rolling shutter and hopefully internal 4k recording with 10-bit output. That would be the dream, and that’s when I’ll be upgrading from my 5Dmkii Magic Lantern RAW and Sony A7r.
1 comment
In addition to the rolling shutter, I’ve also noticed what you could call rolling shudder, where the entire image looks jittery and the pans don’t look smooth. I have done some tests and it is most pronounced in 24 fps with a ss of 50; however, if I shoot at 30 fps with a ss of 60, I don’t notice it. Have you noticed that? Is there a reason why you can’t set the ss to 48 in 24 fps?