Rolling Shutter/Banding with Lights?

[BrendanLeahy]

Hey all,

I love filming live concerts, but keep running into an issue with banding on LED lights (best spot for this is on guitarist at 0:31):

Usually, I'm filming at 96fps and a 1/192 shutter, if not higher.

If you go about halfway into this video by Kevin Gansemans, all of his nighttime shots seem to be just fine:

Any thoughts on why the banding occurs? I've tried playing with the shutter, but the more I up it, the more banding there is.

 

[Nick Gardner]

Need slower shutter, not faster. Depnding on the LEDs, you may just not be able to shoot that fast. Try 120th of a second. Then 1/96th. !/60th at 60 should work, I suspect 120th would as well, but really just have to test.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Flashing lights, high contrast, and rolling shutter is not a good combination. It's a CMOS characteristic with almost every camera, except those with mechanical shutters (Alexa Studio) or a global shutter (Sony F55).

 

[Marc Wielage]

Flashing lights, high contrast, and rolling shutter is not a good combination. It's a CMOS characteristic with almost every camera, except those with mechanical shutters (Alexa Studio) or a global shutter (Sony F55). Slower shutter speeds will improve this at the cost of making the motion slightly blurry.

 

[Andrew Gentle]

The Motion Mount could be an option if the camera is one of the DSMCs. Aside from that, I've found that slowing the shutter speed down in tenth-of-a-second increments and watching the LEDs to be the easiest way to reduce it to an acceptable level without going too far and affecting your motion blur too much. The last event I can remember shooting with this problem required a shutter speed of 1/42 at 25 fps (this is with 50 Hz power but imported LEDs doing crazy PWM dimming at unknown frequencies). 1/42 was close enough to 1/50 180° shutter so that it didn't introduce too much blur.
I have a set of LEDs which don't seem to cause problems at all, and some others which do, there doesn't seem to be a predictable way of knowing what will cause problems.