If you’ve purchased and have been shooting with the Sony A7s, you may have noticed that it has possibly one of the worst rolling shutters to ever be put in a full frame camera.
It’s so bad in fact that it really limits you to only 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 instragram 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 effect image quality. Remember, when shooting HD you really only need something like 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
Metabones EF Lens to Sony NEX Speed Booster
As long as you’re shooting with full frame lenses, you can equip your Sony A7s with a speed booster, get nearly the same field of view with a reduced rolling shutter. There you go!
Use Premiere’s Warp Stabilizer
You’ll find this filter 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 shutter.
However, it’s not always perfect. You’ll find that it can sometimes make your image look bendy and warpy 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, and there will always be something better.
I’ve been shooting video 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 it’s CMOS full frame cameras. So my bet, 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 making the upgrade from my 5Dmkii Magic Lantern RAW and Sony A7r.
Also Canon has some special surprises for us this year. A new 7Dmkii. And if they’re smart, they’ll not ignore video features. Which Canon is not smart so they probably will.
There you go!
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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?