What is "shutter speed", and what does it do on my camcorder?
Well, shutter speed is kind of a term that's held over from the old film days because video cameras don't really have a traditional shutter on them. There's no actual piece of mechanical anything that opens and closes to let light through. It's really just done by sampling information off the chip. How often do we pull that information of the chip is equivalent to a shutter speed. So maybe what you've selected is 1/60 of a second, which is a fairly standard shutter speed, which means every 60th of a second, all the information that's on that chip is pulled off and put down to your tape. But you have other selections. You might have 1/3 of a second shutter speed, or all the way up to 2000, 3000, 4000. Think of it this way, the higher the shutter speed, the more detail you're going to get, because you're opening and closing, or pulling that information off more often. The more often you pull it off, the more detail you get. But, if the shutter is open more, it's also closed more, so that doesn't allow for as much light to come through. A slower shutter speed is going to allow more light to come through and give you a better low light properties, but not as much detail. One of the things you have to consider, is that if you go below 1/60th of a second on a shutter speed, these cameras will tend to give you what's called a “lag.” This would be an image trailing behind, almost like a ghost image. So below a 60th, maybe to a 30th, you're OK, slower than that you're going to get kind of an effect that you may not want. When you move it up, you'll get more detail, but that also might be an effect you don't want. Let me give you a quick example: let's say you were shooting a helicopter, at 1/60th of a second, you won't see those blades, but neither would I if I was just looking at the helicopter. Move it up to 2000 or 4000 or even 10000, and those blades not only become visible, they look like their standing still, which is kind of going to fool the eye into thinking ‘why is that helicopter up there?' So shutter speeds, you want to use them for different things, but you also need to know when's appropriate and when isn't.
