any hope for improving rolling shutter?

Here's some food for thought. The 7D uses dual Digic 4 processors... and so does the 1D Mark IV. Yet the 1D has a noticeably improved handling of rolling shutter. Enough for Nocturne (whenever that comes back on Vincent Laforet's blog) to use the Bourne-Cam shaky handheld shots without fear of gelatinous looking footage. Nocturne co-director Stu Maschwitz confirms this in his own retelling of the shoot (www.prolost.com).

This makes me wonder... would a future firmware update possibly improve upon the 7D's rolling shutter?

Would Canon care to do so? Can we as a community petition them to do so like what we did with the 5Dmk2's manual controls and (hopefully by next year) 24p? To me, there are only two real major limitations with the 7D, one being rolling shutter, and the other aliasing/line skipping. I can use filters and make design choices to limit or eliminate elements that would create nasty aliasing artefacts (to a certain degree, anyway) but rolling shutter virtually eliminates certain types of shooting styles... styles which would be really useful for high-energy action movies, commercials, documentaries, etc. I mean, it's great for slower paced projects, but I'm finding rolling shutter to be a very limiting factor.

By the way, I do own a 7D so unfortunately I can't really pull a "won't get one until they fix this" card... I already love the camera as is, just think that if they can eliminate this ONE thing, I think canon would instantly sell this camera to hundreds if not thousands more customers who view this little problem as a deal breaker.

wow, no responses. I guess no one really cares about rolling shutter then .

Excuse my lack of knowledge on this matter, but what is rolling shutter and what does it look like? I've just finished my second ever video clip and noticed some clips had certain "issues".

Also, like to ask the same question about aliasing?

I posted this exact same question (with the same reasoning -- Dual DIG!C IVs) to Stu at prolost a few days ago, hoping that he would know something about the technology behind it... He hasn't answered.

There are a few different things about the 1DmkIV that could potentially mean it's not possible on the 7D. The obvious place to look is the sensor; not only is the 7D a higher megapixel count (meaning it's pushing more data through the pipeline), but also an older design than that of the 1DmkIV. From my understanding, the 1D's sensor is completely new, so it's possible that Canon focused on giving it an awesome readout speed and/or line drawing speed to reduce the Rolling Shutter.

THAT SAID, I like to think that there's still hope. Something tells me that if Dual Digic IVs is what is making the 8fps RAW possible in the 7D, it should also be more significant in capturing the source video data off the sensor. More over, if a single Digic IV can handle the 5DmkIIs video and stills as well (and fast, and with as much/little Rolling Shutter) as the 5DmkII has, than dual D4s should, at the very least, be able to perform twice as well in those departments... Assuming of course, that it's not being limited by the actual sensor (maybe 18mp is the DD4s breaking point.)

The problem, unfortunately, is that I know very little about the real math and tech behind it, so all of my speculation is just that (speculation.)

-Rogue5-

The 1D Mk IV still has some (more mild) rolling shutter:
http://www.vimeo.com/7757573

The 1D Mk IV still has some (more mild) rolling shutter:
http://www.vimeo.com/7757573

True its still there, but going from Nocturne and Stu's impressions it's much improved over the 5DmkII and 7D. I mean, sure it's manageable on the 5D/7D, but it'd be nice if we didn't have to worry about going handheld so much (after all, attaching steady rigs to these cameras kind of breaks their stealth appeal.)

-Rogue5-

Yes, there is hope and the solutions are simple but you will have to compromise.

1) Shoot wider, less distortion. When you anticipate rolling shutter to become a problem use a wider lens to minimize the effects.

2) Shoot 60p and drop every other frame. The result will be 30p but this will improve rolling shutter by a factor of two. Same for 50p with an output of 25p.

3) Finally, crop the image down. The distortion comes from a temporal difference between photosite sampling, the more photosites the greater the skew. Therefore, by using less of the sensor photosites you reduce distortion. Shoot 1080p and crop for 720p for a considerable improvement.

Yes, there is hope and the solutions are simple but you will have to compromise.

1) Shoot wider, less distortion. When you anticipate rolling shutter to become a problem use a wider lens to minimize the effects.

2) Shoot 60p and drop every other frame. The result will be 30p but this will improve rolling shutter by a factor of two. Same for 50p with an output of 25p.

3) Finally, crop the image down. The distortion comes from a temporal difference between photosite sampling, the more photosites the greater the skew. Therefore, by using less of the sensor photosites you reduce distortion. Shoot 1080p and crop for 720p for a considerable improvement.

I think you're missing the point of the OP. He's talking about improving the hardware via firmware, not changing your shooting style to minimize the effect (which *should* be common knowledge as solutions/workarounds are well documented, as you've mentioned above.)

Ultimately it comes down to this: Is the 1DmkIV's improved rolling shutter performance due to improvements to the actual imaging sensor or due to new found efficiencies in the DualDIGICIV's programming? If Canon was able to spend a little more time making the dualDigicIVs programming more efficient on the 1DmkIV, than there should be nothing stopping them from doing the same for the 7D via firmware update (which would be sweet.)

-Rogue5-

The Foundry has a decent plugin for rolling shutter removal in AE - that's only our hope in the iterm of a decent read/reset time

but it is insanely expensive. i'd rather say we roll out a petition to bring virtualdub to the mac! the steady plugin kills almost every rolling shutter situation.