DSLR Shutter Speed Advice...

[Gary]

Hey all, need some advice. Gareth, Wiggy, I know you shoot with SLR's a lot so I'm looking at you!

You may or not know that I bought a 7D some time ago to do film making with... well that never happened and I've become addicted to photography and now spend all my time doing that... I'm working on some artwork for a bands album and they have asked if I would shoot them a video, of course I said yes... but now I'm realising I've got a lot of learning to do to work out the video side out, don't want to disappoint with this, think they will be expecting it to be up to my photography standards...

It's a basic question... I know they say your shutter speed should be double your frame rate, is this gospel? What happens if I'm shooting outside in the day and I want a shallow depth of fields therefore use a low aperture of say f2.8 and my shutter speed is 1/60... it's just going to burn out! If I up my shutter speed to something a lot faster my footage is going to look horribly sharp and choppy... Is there any kind of technique round this or do you just shoot at whatever shutter speed exposes best?

I suppose a couple of ND filters would do the trick.

Oh yea, check out my portfolio site... tinyurl.com/3sp7dpk (shameless)

[wiggy]

if you want the shallow depth of field in daylight you will need ND filters, you can up the shutter speed, as a rule shooting at 25p you want it set at 50 to give it the most realistic film look, i sometimes shoot at 100 when doing something fast moving like sport or something, ridley scott uses fast shutter speeds in films like gladiator and spielberg in private ryan, shoot on manual, make sure you don't over expose as the footage usually looks darker on the screen than it does once in you edit.
i use the technicolor cinestyle picture profile which looks rubbish until you add the s curve in colour correction, just use the free magic bullet colorista with lut buddy, does it all for you, you can google this, loads of advice. one bit of advice, dont go to shallow, everyone is doing this now but seem to go too shallow which is a pain to keep in focus plus pro's dont usually go too shallow.
just experiment and have fun, that's all i have been doing

[Gary]

Cheers Wiggy, filters is what I shall use then.

Yea I've been researching the technicolour thingy-ma-bob. Will definatley be using it.

I know what you mean about not using to shallow a depth of field, it's hard enough get a photograph nice and sharp at f1.8 so video is going to be next to impossible! Thats why I said f2.8. Will only be using it for close up head shots...

[wiggy]

the image is very flat though, it is harder to get focus with it, all comes out in post though