From the course: Video Foundations: Cameras and Shooting

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Choosing the right shutter speed

Choosing the right shutter speed

From the course: Video Foundations: Cameras and Shooting

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Choosing the right shutter speed

When I first started in video, shutter speed was one of those terms that I heard many times but honestly never knew exactly what it meant, or more importantly, what it was for and how I could apply it to my own video projects. So let me make it plain for you. The primary purpose of manipulating your shutter speed is to control how motion is portrayed in a scene. In other words, how the moving things and people look on video, normal, the way our naked eye sees it, blurry, or sharp, strobe-like, and surreal. To best understand shutter speed, think of a still film camera that actually has a little mechanical shutter or door that opens and closes to expose each frame of film for a given amount of time, such as 1/48th of a second or 1/1000th of a second. The thing you need to understand is when you are working with video, these rules of shutter speeds still apply exactly the same to each individual frame of video. So there are two key principles to understand when it comes to shutter…

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