ND Filters for Natural Motion?

[Meanderthal]

Recently I shot some video of sea ice going out with the tide in Cook inlet. The video looked good except that it had some annoying judder. My understanding is that this can be reduced or eliminated and replaced with more natural looking motion blur by increasing the exposure time. Could this be accomplished without overexposing the ice by using ND filters?

 

[Thomas B]

Recently I shot some video of sea ice going out with the tide in Cook inlet. The video looked good except that it had some annoying judder. My understanding is that this can be reduced or eliminated and replaced with more natural looking motion blur by increasing the exposure time. Could this be accomplished without overexposing the ice by using ND filters?

Yes

 

[brett8883]

Recently I shot some video of sea ice going out with the tide in Cook inlet. The video looked good except that it had some annoying judder. My understanding is that this can be reduced or eliminated and replaced with more natural looking motion blur by increasing the exposure time. Could this be accomplished without overexposing the ice by using ND filters?

The idea of an ND filter is to reduce the shutter speed without changing the exposure.

Yes, that’s the point.

 

[hydrolift]

My experience from using the drone in bright conditions (in sunny Spain) is that 30 fps has very little judder, barely noticable. With 25 fps I have noticable to a lot of judder when turning. Pretty big difference between the two fps settings in my opinion.

 

[Dave Maine]

60 FPS is even better. The base problem is the speed of the movement with respect to the frame rate. Higher rates of movement will always have noticeable changes between frames. Motion blurring by using a slower shutter speed somewhat masks the problem, but doesn’t get rid of it entirely. Hollywood cinematographers always use complex rate tables to determine how fast they can pan or zoom, without this happening.

 

[Meanderthal]

Thanks all.

I don't want to deal with the trouble or expense of ND filters if it would make little difference or if the same effect could be accomplished just by locking a lower exposure value.
I'm leaning toward grabbing the 4 filter kit from Free Well but at $15 per filter it isn't easy to pull the trigger. I'm a bit of a tight wad and proud of it.

 

[Thomas B]

Lowering frame rate w/o a filter will make your videos dark and often lose detail you can’t restore in post. So it’s not the same. For the cheapest trial recommend Freewell variable ND filter...