Amsterdam NTSC shoot with 50Hz lighting question.

Hi,

I'm new to this forum, so forgive my unannounced intrusion, but have some experience of this problem in reverse.

A few years ago I brought a PAL VX1000 to the US to shoot a documentary. I failed to take into account the 50hz/60hz issue and had some footage which exhibited strobe. I could have solved it by using the camera's 1/60 shutter speed.

My take on this is that you are almost certain to get strobe under fluorescent lighting - which may be quite irritating to watch - but probably little that is noticeable with standard tungsten bulbs. Using the 1/100 shutter speed should help - but of course the trade off is the requirement for higher light levels. In my experience, the ambient lighting levels in a lot of hotel ballrooms are barely adequate for video at the best of times. Maybe the best thing to do is to allow time before the shoot begins to experiment in the venue and then pick the optimum solution.

Good luck with the shoot.

Richard

Mike,

I had a quick look on Google and found this site:
http://www.alrad.co.uk/datasheets/FAQ003-Illumination.PDF
About halfway through it mentions the problem with halogen and flicker, if you're not using 25fps cameras. I don't really know enough about the technology to be able to estimate how much flicker you're likely to get with any given light source. The problems I had were mainly in a parking lot at night, which I assume was lit using metal-halide lamps. I suppose you have to weigh up whether shooting in PAL and then transcoding to NTSC is likely to give better results than accepting a certain amount of flicker (or possibly adding gain to compensate for inadequate light levels when shooting 1/100).

Unfortunately, I have no experience of rental houses in Amsterdam - we always took our own equipment from the UK when shooting in the Netherlands. I now live and work in Oregon.

I hope you manage to solve the dilemma!

Richard