Setting the right shutter speed is an important task in video and timelapse. Although setting it in a video is easier than in the timelapse, it’s not always a piece of cake. This text was created during the work on the bigger article about ND filters and motion blur in timelapse. However, it gets quite long, and while I consider it as an introduction for beginners, I decided to exclude it to another post (I still think I write too long articles, but I want it to be as complex as it could be).

Motion blur is very interesting topic. Once you understand the 180 degrees rule, check out how you can apply that in your films using ND filters: ND Filters in Filmmaking – Make Your Footage Cinematic 

So here you’ll learn the general rule, naming and the differences that gave us various shutter speeds. In the following article, you will find how to set desired shutter speed in hard conditions (especially when it’s too bright). Check out the post: Shutter speed in timelapse – ND filtersIf you dont want to miss new tutorials, click the little red bell in the bottom left corner. You will get notification every time I release new exciting content (don’t worry, it’s not that often ;))

What is a motion blur and where does it come from?

The easiest way to explain that is to  compare it to the photography. In the video, each individual frame is created as a photo. As in photography, you can freeze or blur the movement in the frame (on each one individually). Of course, the blur depends on the shutter speed that you’ve selected.

I made a quick setup for this tutorial for a better explanation of how the shutter speed affects the image. In the picture below you can see a pinwheel mounted on a tripod, a fan that propels the pinwheel and of course a camera, white backcloth and a light source not included in the picture. The fan provides a constant speed of the pinwheel, and it’s very important for this test. I take a few pictures of the rotating pinwheel with different camera settings. Shutter speed is the important part here, I change the other settings only to maintain the same exposure.

wiatrak-setup1-2

In the picture below you can see the effect of this test – a visual representation of the motion blur. In the left one, you can’t even say what’s in the picture, and that’s the longest exposure time. On the other hand, the right one looks still, because the exposure time (shutter speed) is short enough to freeze the movement. Of course, the parameters placed in the image depend on the speed of the subject (and also the amount of light available). Sometimes 1/800 will freeze the movement, and sometimes you’ve got to go even further to do that.

wiatraki1

Let’s talk about the second pinwheel, this one shot at 1/50s. As you can see, it’s far from being razor sharp. The shutter speed was set to 1/50s, that means the camera is capturing the light through that time. The pinwheel is rotating so fast, that through that 1/50s it rotates several degrees and it’s captured in the image. To be sure you understand – the camera starts taking a picture when the blades are, let’s say at 0° and finishes the exposure at for example 15°. That 15° rotation is captured in the picture and appears as a blur.

Naming

There are two different namings here – shutter speed and shutter angle. Shutter speed is a time of single frame exposure defined in seconds (just like in photography), for example 1/48s, 1/100s etc. Shutter angle is more complicated, as it gives us shutter speed that depends on fps (frames per second) that you’re shooting. I’ll explain that later in the text. Some cameras have only shutter angle setting, and in some you can choose between these two (even in small cameras, like GH4).

180° rule

The main rule in setting shutter speed in a video is the 180 degree rule. It tells, that you should set your shutter speed to twice of your frame rate (to be exact – 1/[2x fps]). So, according to this, if you’re shooting 24fps (frames per second) you should use a shutter speed of 1/48s, for 25 fps – 1/50s, for slow motion 200fps – 1/400s etc. Simple, right? 😉

When I first heard of that rule I’ve had two questions, which helped me understand it correctly (and then break it on purpose): what does it do to my image (how will it look like if you choose different shutter speed) and where does it come from.

Moviecam_schematic_animation
Shutter mechanism in film camera – Wikipedia

Let’s start with the second one: the 180° rule comes from the old school film cameras. The gif shows how the shutter mechanisms work in a film camera. You can see rotating semicircle, that works as a shutter mechanism. And that’s where the degrees came from – the film is exposed during 180° rotation of the circle (the “hollow” semicircle). During the second 180° rotation the film is covered (so there’s no exposure) and it’s time to move the film to the next frame.

A film camera has got to have that time to physically move the film down for the next exposure, so there can’t be shutter angles higher than 180°. There could be lower – for example 90° (1/96s for 24fps), but it was used only in specific situations. The 180° shutter is considered to be more natural. In today’s digital cameras there isn’t any physical shutter (of course, in video mode, in photography there is a physical shutter, but different than in film cameras), so exposure is accomplished by electronics of the camera. The camera doesn’t need time to move the film, so you can achieve even 360° exposure (for example 1/25s for 25fps). Below, you can find the visual representation of different shutter angles (yellow is the hollow part).

shutterangle wiki
Shutter angles – Wikipedia

And now it’s time for the first question: what does it do to the image?

The shutter speed determines the amount of motion blur in the video – on every frame (and of course the amount of light that reaches the sensor or film, but that’s not the point of this article). We, as timelapsers, know best, that the final video is a set of pictures. Shutter speed is the time of exposure for each frame, like in photography. So if you want to ‘freeze’ the movement in the frame you set high shutter speed (for example 1/200s, 1/500s etc), if you want to blur the movement you set longer shutter speed – 1/50, 1/25 etc.

However, unlike in photography, you don’t watch each frame separately here. At 1/50s each frame with moving objects can look bad and blurry, but when you play 25 frames like that in one second it’ll look surprisingly naturally. Furthermore, the video without motion blur can look odd to viewers. That’s because human eye also sees the motion blur, so video shot according to the 180° rule would look closer to what we all see. You can try to fast wave your hand in front of your eyes. It’s not crispy sharp, but blurry.

In the gif below you can see our pinwheel again. This time it’s a video shot at 25fps with three different shutter speeds: 1/25s – 360° shutter angle, 1/50 – 180° and 1/500s – about 20°. Here I can proof, what I’ve written above. The 1/50s shutter speed, so 180° shutter angle looks closer to what my eyes saw than any other shutter speed. You can take my word for it or just check it by yourself. You can simply build the same setup I did 😉

So, now you know the rule. Should you stick to it no matter what’s going on? Of course not! You should know the rules to break it on purpose (not by accident). There are a few examples of doing that in big films. In Saving Private Ryan (1998) cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski used a shutter angle of 45° for explosions and 90° for most of the running shots (which gave 1/198s and 1/96s).

Often, when you see an explosion with a 180-degree shutter it can be a thing of beauty, but a 45-degree shutter looks very frightening. [Steven Spielberg]

I hope now you know why setting your camera to auto settings is like letting someone else decide how your films gonna look like.

In conclusion – using 180° rule will give you image that’s close to what people see and what we all have watched in cinema for years. Like every rule, you can break it to get the look that you want.

Thanks for visiting my blog, I hope you’re not disappointed 😉 Now, when you’re a specialist in motion blur rules, read my article about ND filters and motion blur in timelapse! It’ll be available soon on the blog.

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12 Comments

  1. Hey, świetnie wytłumaczone.
    Mam jednak pytanie – czy zasada czasu migawki (x2) względem fps odnosi się do filmu źródłowego, czy do docelowego? Tzn. – nagrywam w 50 fps, ale finalny zmontowany film będzie miał 25 fps. Czy w takiej sytuacji nagranie może być z migawką 1/50? Zawsze tak nagrywam i nigdy nie widziałem efektu ubocznego.

    • Tomasz

      Trzymając się zasady 180 stopni to:
      1. Spowolniony dwukrotnie film 50fps na timeline 25fps – migawka 1/100
      2. Film 50fps na timeline 25fps bez spowolnienia (czyli wyświetlana co druga klatka) – 1/50.
      W wielu przypadkach może w ogole nie być widać różnicy, dlatego jak czasem będziesz zmuszony/będziesz chciał ustawić inna migawke to tragedii nie będzie 😉 ważne żebyś wiedział, że jest taka zasada i w większości przypadków się do niej stosował lub świadomie łamał

  2. Dear Tomasz,

    I found your excellent blog when I googled “using neutral density filters” (yours was the very first of 239,000 results!). I started to study the Motion Blur in Timelapse article, but jumped to this one first at your suggestion. I have bookmarked Home on your blog and look forward to hours of most enjoyable study. I am an elder man, living on a fixed income, and so could never afford a DSLR to do timelapse with, but then I discovered the GoPro Hero 5 Black. I found a set of ND filters to fit it, hence my looking for information about using them in making timelapse image sequences; I was aware from the start of the need to impart motion blur to make the subsequent video easier to look at. I have a Fujifilm Finepix S-1, a well-made Bridge camera as opposed to a DSLR, and have enjoyed photography at the hobbyist level for many (45+) years but became interested in timelapse only in the last year or so. The Fuji camera could handle at best only a 2-second or more shot interval, and fast-moving subjects are the most fun to work with. Thanks very much for providing this interesting and educational blog.

    • Tomasz

      Thanks, I’m really glad you like my blog 🙂 Good luck with developing your passion for timelapse! 🙂

  3. Pingback: Timelapse vs. Video - Beyond The Time - timelapse photography blog

  4. I’ve been studying motion blur, 180 rule, etc lately and one question I have is, does it apply to ultra high frame rates? It sounds like the main benefit of the 180 degree rule is to achieve natural looking motion blur, but what if you are shooting 120fps,240fps, or even 1000fps? All motion blur is pretty much gone once you’re shooting at 1/1000th of a sec, so is there still a reason to shoot 1/2000th if you happen to have a phantom camera that shoots 1/1000 fps?

    • Tomasz

      Depending on what you’re shooting. If the objects is extremely fast, the motion blur could appear too.

  5. This is going to sound like a silly question, its a conversation I’ve had with a few people lately. I come from a photography background and am slowly going into film, with photography you have free rein of changing the shutter speed depending on the output you are after. I understand that shooting at different shutter speeds with people in the frame can make them look blurry or can create a weird effect, but for an example, if you use auto settings (I know, very bad) but on auto settings the camera would adjust the shutter speed and the output still looks normal.
    So my question is , does changing the shutter speed throughout a film matter if there isn’t anything in frame to create motion blur?

    • Tomasz

      As the difference is only on the motion blur it’ll be visible only when you’ve got something moving in the frame or the camera itself is.moving. Also, this object has to move with certain speed, with slow moving objects difference could also be invisible

  6. Andy Harcup

    Thank you for taking the time to write and share this article, this is exactly what I need to understand and you ensured that I nailed it! You rock 🙂

  7. I think viewfinder played a key role of setting shutter degree of 180 degree in the past. Light is reflected to the viewfinder when in “closed” position. At 180 degree, you are observing approximately the same amount of light that goes into camera.