THE SHIELD, seasons 1-2 (MERGED THREAD; SPOILERS) (1 Viewer)

[Mike Graham]

Sounds to me like they've toyed with the speed of the camera not for time limitations but to give it the scene a sense of urgency. The best example of this would be in any action sequence, particularly where there's a chase involved. The more jittery the image, the more it seems like you're running along side the characters...

 

[Rob Speicher]

There's a scene in the episode "Partners" that really bothers me, where it's sped up or looks completely different from the rest of the episode. It's where Vic goes to Joe's(?) apartment. It looks very off.

 

[Christopher E]

The frame rate during the action scenes is the same as the rest of the show which is 24fps (except in the sped up scenes) . They just raise the shutter speed so for each frame the camera captures light for less time. This means each frame has less motion blur (since only a small point in time is captured) and when played back it gives a more jittery look. This effect is greatly overused in music videos because people think it looks cool. While I do like how it gives a sense of immediancy to the scenes, it is actually necessary in The Shield due to it's documentary style camera work. Because the camera is always moving around the high shutter speed allows us to see a crisp image at each point in time. At a lower shutter speed the images would be blurry and hard to interpret. This is much more important in action scenes than it is in others.

That scene in "Partners" really bothered me too. It's quite annoying when they use a high shutter speed coupled with a high frame rate. It's a very odd effect. There was another really obviously sped up scene in the episode where Vic and Shane go into a bar to try to scare the guys dealing drugs to school kids. They shot it with a fairly high shutter speed, because it was an action scene, and then sped it up. It looked really bad. I was actually noticing almost 1 sped up scene an episode (I've been watching the season 2 dvd for the last few weeks), but it seems like there are less at the end of the season. Season 1 only had a few sped up scenes that I can remember, one of them being at the end of the first episode ( I think that may have been to fit with the song). Maybe that's why there are less deleted scenes this year.