I am curios as to what the best shutter speed is for filming skateboarding. I wan't to be able to play back in slow-motion with the best results. I am new to some of the features on the VX2000, so be gentle.

-- Frederick Gauthier (yahboy13@hotmail.com), March 13, 2002

Answers

Running the camera in manual mode, you can select a fixed shutter speed. For action like this, you will want to run a higher-than- 1/60th shutter speed. For shots that will be played back in slow- motion you can run the shutter speed as high as the exposure will allow. But for sequences played back at normal speed, this will cause a stobescopic effect that viewers may find annoying. My answer would be find the best balance between clean frames and non- strobing. A starting place (assuming that you are shooting exterior shots in day light) would be 1/100. The camera will show your the effect in realtime through the viewfinder, so you can adjust until you start getting too much srobing, then back off a little. This should give you the best of both worlds.

The manual suggest using the progressive scan mode for sports shots but at a dissapointing 15 FPS, this would be totally unacceptable. The result, however, does yield a crisp frame with both fields rendered at the same time. You'll have to evaluate its affect on the video yourself to see if you can tolerate the slow FPS.

Good Luck, Randy Tate

-- Randy Tate (randytate@hotmail.com), April 02, 2002.