Question by davrukin: Camcorder shutter speed/frame rate question.?
I have an old “Sony Handycam Video8 CCD-TR64 NTSC” camcorder. (http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=CCDTR64) In the manual it says that it can have a shutter speed of 1/4000 second. Does that mean that it can do 4000 frames-per-second video? The thing is, you can’t connect it directly to your PC. I have a USB video capture device that plugs into my PC. I think that it can only do 30 fps, so that defeats the purpose. Does anyone have an answer on what is possible to do? Thanks.
Best answer:
Answer by Nikolai
No, sorry. Shutter speed and frame rate are two totally different things. Shutter speed simply affects the amount of light let into the lens and how fast by controlling the amount of time the shutter stays open. Frame Rate affects how many frames per second the camera is processing. Taking the example of old film cameras, if you wanted to get a slow motion effect, you would just crank the film faster, called “overcranking”, and vise versa for time-lapse stuff. So 1/4000 says that the shutter can open and close in 1/4000 of a second, which is excellent for capturing fast action, and would help if you were to slow the video down in post, but it’s not the same as overcranking or undercranking.
Because it’s a Video8 camera, you could purchase an inexpensive Digital8 camera which is backwards compatible in order to capture your footage into the computer.
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