Slightly Out Of Sync

As we are all watching more screens these days with moving pictures that show people speaking, we are all familiar with the slightly out-of-sync presenter. They are generally heard slightly before or after their image is received and the sounds do not match the lips. This is not much of a real problem, but our brains keep poking us and complaining that something is not right. We start to lose concentration, watching the disparity between sound and vision. Pretty soon we have to actually stop looking at the speaker and just listen to what they say - a dangerous thing, as the quality of audio may also be poor - and the quality of the thoughts being expressed even worse. We all remember the wagon wheels in old cowboy movies that went slowly backwards, even as the Deadwood Stage went rollin' on over the hills. A slight disparity between the speed of the spokes as they turned and the frame rates of the movie cameras - each spoke being the same, they could be made to go forward and backward at will. This could also work on helicopter blades if you had a variable speed control on the camera. Most disturbing to see a film of an H-19 Chickasaw going up and down with nothing apparently turning. Well, I've done some experimenting with the Bunnings LED lights and their flickering effect on the LCD screen of the Fujifilm camera. As I looked at the screen of the Little Studio Fujifilm X-T10 flickering away, I decided to put my hand over the third LED lamp. No flicker from the two smaller lamps. Then I put my hand over one of the smaller ones and noted that the frequency of the flicker remained the same. Logic - the two small lights are in sync with themselves and the Fujifilm screen and the third is not. Was the same effect happening inside in the EVF? It was. LCD and EVF are in sync. Then an " Aha! " moment...was this the same with the other Fujifilm cameras in the studio? No, it is not. You cannot see flickering on the screens of the Fujifilm X-T2 nor on the X-Pro1. They are either markedly different screens or running at a different rate. You can see the same flickering on the screens of a Fujifilm X-E2 camera. A final guide for the perplexed - some years ago I instituted a kaizen update for the X-E2 that Fujifilm said would bring it to the same operating standard as the X-T10. Did it change something in the screens when that happened? In practical terms none of this seems to make any difference. I used the X-T2 and X-Pro1 in my main studio for a dancer's shoot and utilized Bunnings lights as main, fill, hair, and backdrop - and didn't see anything flicker at all. I took the precaution of a custom white balance beforehand and the Lightroom processing was very simple. There seemed no real variance in colour temperature between the various powers of security LEDs. In human terms, both the dancers and I were less fatigued after three hours of shooting under constant cool light than when we had done the same effort under studio strobes. The shutter speed was lower, the aperture wider, and the ISO higher, but I don't think the images suffered much for it. On a hot day, the studio space remained a lot cooler and we weren't frazzled by the machine-gun pop of the strobes. And the CE Plug? Buy Phottix LED panels from us and get a studio light stand thrown into the bargain. No flicker, adjustable intensity, and adjustable colour temperature.