Fluorescent Lighting Problems Solved - Sort of....

Did some filming last week under fluorescent lighting, and whilst the monitor feed was fine putting the HD footage into FCPX created the unwanted rolling bands I'm sure you've all seen before.

I looked for a filter that may remove them, but couldn't really find one.

I did find an FCP7 tutorial that used the 3-color (sic) corrector built into it, but we don't have exactly the same in FCPX. So with potential re-shoots looming I was in a pickle.

Luckily the footage was created on a tripod with no camera movement, and only a small area in the centre moving, so I decided to create some extra layers including a freeze frame stretched over the timeline and a mask over the moving footage showing only the bits in the middle.

When its all rendered out - the rolling band is vastly reduced.

Next time I'll take the camera out of Auto mode and select a frame rate of 1/50 to stop this happening, but if anyone has similar footage I hope this tutorial helps you out. Its all a bit obvious really, but sometimes when you're in the problem its difficult to see a way out.

I've created a tutorial on this which you'll find on my channel and blog as follows :

Did you try the built in rolling shutter correction inside FCP X ?

You mean "shutter" rate of 1/50, not "frame" rate I assume.

Ooops, yes I did mean shutter rate - don't know how that crept in there.

Rolling shutter was in the back of my mind when I originally shot the footage, sort of thought that would sort it. But it didn't do anything...

I don't believe the shutter correction inside of FCPX would reduce any synchronization issues such as that caused by conflicting light sources and frame rates. I think it is designed primarily for the realignment of scan lines to correct skew in a video image often produced by cmos sensors when excessive movement and shaking of the camera occurred during recording.

The stabilization filter works very well (although reduces resolution because it scales the image up, which can be adjusted). The rolling shutter filter I have yet to try on anything.

Here's some good info on correcting rolling shutter distortion.

utopia.csis.pace.edu/cs615/btas2010/BTAS/papers/Paper%20128.pdf