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Comment by BugsJustFindMe

4 days ago

Hmm, I don't think so, but I do get the awful indoor lighting flicker when shooting slow-mo at 240fps that completely ruins indoor videos, and it really seems like Apple could just fix that if they cared at all.

7 comments

BugsJustFindMe

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snailmailman  1 day ago

I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering. The lights are the issue not the camera.

Rooms with these lights give me migraines. I can always tell when lights in a room are like that, and I use the 240hz slow motion on my phone to double check or figure out which specific lights are the issue.

I hate these lights and I don’t understand why places use them.

  • BugsJustFindMe  1 day ago

    > I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering.

    I didn't say it wasn't. I said I bet that Apple, the company that can zero-shot high resolution synthetic 3D views from flat photos, could make the flicker not show in the video if they tried so that slow motion videos shot indoors aren't completely ruined by AC flicker.

  • swiftcoder  1 day ago

    > I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering

    They are, but the camera stack should be detecting and compensating for that - it's pretty easy to detect, since it should be a fixed 50/60Hz depending on geographic location. You typically have to implement this filtering on all manner of light sensors.

    • dagmx  1 day ago

      It’s not just about matching the frequency but also the phase.

      This is easier when your lights are all in phase and also in a single frequency, but you might also have bulbs that are at different frequencies (120 vs 60) or electric hookups that go out of phase.

      It’s a very tricky problem to solve and to the best of my knowledge, nobody truly has. Film lights do clever and expensive tricks to match phase but that’s not feasible in a domestic setup.