p.1 #1 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
I was interested in an R6 but recently had a shooter tell me he can't use the electronic shutter for cheerleading and dance events due to strange streaks or banding caused by the lighting. Has anyone heard of this issue?
p.1 #2 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
This is a common issue with many cameras and lighting systems that aren't on a regular AC (eg 60hz) cycle, such as LED lights and some high intensity overhead lighting. The solution is to use MS or EFCS instead. The R3 has the ability to diagnose the banding/flicker issue and set a custom shutter speed (e.g. 1/123.9). I'm not sure if the R6II has that or not, but you should check. The R5 and R6 do not though.
I have run in to this issue shooting indoor soccer. The place was a dungeon, and on top of that there was the flickering lights. But I went to MS mode and it was fine.
p.1 #3 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
The R6 has an "Anti flicker shooting" mode which should reduce or eliminate this. This mode increases shutter lag somewhat - which might or might not make a worthwhile tradeoff.
That said... you could also just use the mechanical shutter (12FPS) and not have to worry about it anyway.
p.1 #4 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
deepbluejh wrote:
The R6 has an "Anti flicker shooting" mode which should reduce or eliminate this. This mode increases shutter lag somewhat - which might or might not make a worthwhile tradeoff.
That said... you could also just use the mechanical shutter (12FPS) and not have to worry about it anyway.
This mode greatly reduces FPS as well, which kinda defeats the purpose for action shooting.
p.1 #5 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
I might be wrong but dosent rolling shutter come in to play? I change no settings on my R6 and R3 and dont see any on my R3 when using electronic shutter but do see it on R6. Mac
p.1 #6 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
macwest wrote:
I might be wrong but dosent rolling shutter come in to play? I change no settings on my R6 and R3 and dont see any on my R3 when using electronic shutter but do see it on R6. Mac
Yes.
R3's readout speed is significantly faster than that of the R6 so rolling shutter is much more of an issue with the R6. IMO, you only use the electronic shutter of the R6 when you have to. It should not be your default choice for fast action.
p.1 #7 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
deepbluejh wrote:
Yes.
R3's readout speed is significantly faster than that of the R6 so rolling shutter is much more of an issue with the R6. IMO, you only use the electronic shutter of the R6 when you have to. It should not be your default choice for fast action.
I shoot almost exclusively in ES mode on the R6, and have only found rolling shutter a problem in a small percentage of frames. Mostly sports at the high school level is what I've been doing lately. Just depends on what is going on in the background. ES is quite usable on the R6, outside of the LED banding stuff.
p.1 #8 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
It’s the LED lights turning on and off during the reading of the sensor, this is a completely different problem that anti-flicker will not help with. If the light frequency is an exact multiple of the shutter speed, ie 1/400th shutter and 1,200hz light switching frequency, it will go away, but the normal shutter speeds are unlikely to match close enough to the actual frequency to eliminate it, but you might be able to reduce it by adjusting your shutter speed.
The R6II is reported to have the correct flicker control in electronic shutter to deal with this problem, the R3 has it as well. If you have an R6, or an R5 like me, switching to mechanical shutter completely eliminates it. I had this problem at the high school theater during a dance studio job and bought the R5 for the silent electronic shutter for this studio, but had to shoot the job in mechanical. The plus of that is I had few photos to cull afterwards!
p.1 #9 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
Banding is caused by the on-off cycling of most artificial light types - fluorescent, mercury/sodium vapor, LED being the most common. The slower the e-shutter readout, the more obvious the banding becomes. This is also true if lights are operating at a higher frequency than typical American wall power at 60Hz. It means more on-off cycles during the sensor readout period.
My brief experimentation with the R6II in e-shutter in a room lit with a normal LED fixture operating at 60Hz was that bands were very wide and quite faint, but still noticeable if there was a lot of 'empty' space in the photo such as a blank wall. The more cluttered the photo, the less noticeable it was. But the high frequency flicker feature didn't help here (because the flicker wasn't high frequency).
Yesterday I did a corporate event that was on a stage lit with LED spots. Those cycled at around 1200Hz according to the R6II and resulted many more but thinner bands. And this was even true in EFCS. Standard anti-flicker couldn't mitigate it. So I switched to e-shutter and used the high frequency anti-flicker feature, which worked perfectly. One very interesting observation was that after setting up the correct customized shutter speed with the camera in e-shutter, I was able to switch back to EFCS, it held the customized shutter speed and continue to eliminate the banding. Why did I switch back to EFCS? Given the high ISOs I was at, there would have been no dynamic range penalty for staying in e-shutter. But the other reason was that the R6II only offers 40, 20 and 5fps continuous shooting options in e-shutter. And while this event wasn't fast-paced, 5fps was a bit too slow for me, with my preference being more around 10. So 12fps EFCS was what I ended up using.
The other problem I ran into at that event was that if I wanted to include the projector images on screens to each side of the stage, the projectors operated at a different frequency than the stage lighting and required a different custom shutter speed to perfectly correct. When the screens were photographed at incorrect shutter speeds they showed massive color bands, plus the light they reflected back into the room showed the same color banding, therefore I opted to set the shutter speed to correct the screen banding and live with slight banding of the stage lighting.
p.1 #10 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
I shoot at my church and we have a huge LED wall, and then in the halls and classrooms there's many different cycled LEDs throughout the building. I've just resigned myself to using the MS. Even if I had the R3 I wouldn't bother switching speeds for that many lights.
p.1 #12 · R6 Banding or Stange Image Marks in Dance/Cheerleadig?
BobMarkey wrote:
I was interested in an R6 but recently had a shooter tell me he can't use the electronic shutter for cheerleading and dance events due to strange streaks or banding caused by the lighting. Has anyone heard of this issue?
It depends on the lighting. With bad lights that color-cycle/flicker you will have problems with any camera. The R6 isn't worse than another camera, a 1DX for example. It's just that the R6 and other mirrorless cameras have electronic shutter that the DSLRs don't have. With a mechanical shutter (on the R6 or 1DX) that color-cycling/flicker will show up as consecutive frames with different color and/or brightness. With electronic shutter, it appears as bands of varying color within the frame.
You should be able to set the R6 to EFCS or Mechanical shutter and turn on Anti-Flicker to solve the problem (at a reduced fps).
