How to avoid flickering

What causes flickering?

• Fluorescent lights (stay away from that!)

• Shutter speed inconsistencies (older cameras / lazy shutter)

• Dirty lenses (smudges)

• Sticky aperture blades

• Flare (lights facing the cameras)

• Flash speed

What are the solutions?

1. When using flashes The best solution to avoid flickering is to use strobes / flashes / speedlites. This is what I did in this example: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxipx5rFswp/.However, even with flash, you might get some flickering if the light is strobing too fast. Your best option with flashes is always to use a 1/60s shutter speed and a longer duration flash. When using legit Canon 600ex Speedlite, you are 100% sure of never having cameras that are missing the light as the flashes are slow enough to cover the whole exposure. But when using super-powerful lights like the Profoto D2 1000w, you are going to see flickering if you use the light at a lower value. The reason is that these lights are not dimming but instead, they play with the duration to provide more or less light. When you go to 100% power, then your flash lasts just long enough to get picked up by all cameras. Why is it always a better solution to use flashes? By doing this, you are not relying on the physical camera shutter, but instead, it's the light that syncs the subject. There's nothing faster than light, right? :)

What causes flickering?

• Fluorescent lights (stay away from that!)

• Shutter speed inconsistencies (older cameras / lazy shutter)

• Dirty lenses (smudges)

• Sticky aperture blades

• Flare (lights facing the cameras)

• Flash speed

What are the solutions?

1. When using flashes The best solution to avoid flickering is to use strobes / flashes / speedlites. This is what I did in this example: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxipx5rFswp/.However, even with flash, you might get some flickering if the light is strobing too fast. Your best option with flashes is always to use a 1/60s shutter speed and a longer duration flash. When using legit Canon 600ex Speedlite, you are 100% sure of never having cameras that are missing the light as the flashes are slow enough to cover the whole exposure. But when using super-powerful lights like the Profoto D2 1000w, you are going to see flickering if you use the light at a lower value. The reason is that these lights are not dimming but instead, they play with the duration to provide more or less light. When you go to 100% power, then your flash lasts just long enough to get picked up by all cameras. Why is it always a better solution to use flashes? By doing this, you are not relying on the physical camera shutter, but instead, it's the light that syncs the subject. There's nothing faster than light, right? :)

2. When using constant light Shutter speed is not always accurate when working with basic Canon DSLRs. Depending on the age of your cameras, when you shoot at 1/60s, all cameras are going to be able to give you that exact speed, but as soon as you go over 1/250s, you'll start to see dark frames. It is especially visible when you go at super fast shutter speed like 1/4000s. The older your cameras get, the more flickering you are likely to have. Over time, the camera shutters becomes lazyThe sweet spot is a shutter speed of 1/200s. That means that you are likely to see a little bit of blur if your subject is moving fast, but you'll reduce the flickering.If only one of your cameras is giving you a brighter frame, you can simply swap it for another one. Diagnostic: if you get more flickering when shooting at faster shutter speed, then you can be sure that this is your main issue.

3. Clean your lenses (Both ends!) This seems like a long stretch, but we had an issue recently with one of our 176 cameras being way brighter than the other ones. We ended up finding that the inside of the lens had a finger print on it! Always clean your lenses to avoid flickering due to smudge.

4. Check the aperture blades Over time, some of your lenses might start to be slower at reaching the requested aperture (they are at wide aperture until you take the shot). Check to either replace your lenses or clean the aperture bladesDiagnostic: if you get more flickering when selecting a narrow aperture (f9...), then you know that this is your main issue

5. De-flickering in Adobe Premiere (for studio work)If you're shooting high end studio work in RAW, you can always deflicker in Adobe Premiere using BCC Flicker fixer.