flicker rate & stabilizer

[RRSounds at aol.com]

Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 23:33:48, Colin McDonald <cmmcdonald at mac.com>
wrote:

<<
I remember watching a television shoot in a set with a prominent
computer monitor. The camera operators synced their cameras together
and then varied the sync signal a wee bit up and down until the flicker
and lines disappeared from the image of the monitor.

Just because the frame rate equalled the flicker rate (unlikely anyway)
would not necessarily give a clean image - you might just as easily get
a fixed black line or other lines.  There's more to it that that.

There must be someone on the list with studio experience of this kind
of issue.

Colin McDonald
>>


When I was the Video Maintenance Technician for the Weekend
Today Show a few years ago, they had a fellow named "Mr. Gadget,"
who they would bring on to demonstrate technical matters. And
outdoor cooking, among other things as I reall. This was before he
was arrested on cocaine charges in Miami and never heard from again.
But I digress.

When the iMac was first introduced, the Today show had a
demonstration of 'state-of-the-art' computers by Mr Gadget. I was
called upon to put together the computers on the set. I recall several
other computers of the Windows ilk on display the same day, for
comparison's sake. As a Mac user, I was SO friggin proud to see (and
put my hands on) the iMac, with all the buzz it was getting after so
many years of Mac negativity in the press.
Sorry, I'm digressing again. Must be a bad case of indigresstion. :-)

Anyway, we had the damndest time getting all the computers' monitors
to look good on-camera, because they all used different scan rates.
Eventually, a more saavy co-worker told me that you don't try to sync,
you don't try to make the camera shutter slower than the scan rate,
you make the shutter speed as *fast as possible.* This may make one
*line* of the display brighter than the others, but it's hardly noticeable.

I didn't believe him (it's totally counter-intuitive, to me anyway) until
he showed me...

David P. Reaves, III
TransLanTech Sound, LLC