Though everything today is electronic, all the terminology is from back when cameras were film.
Shutter speed in the old days of film was the amount of time that the shutter on the camera was open and allowing light to hit the film to create a frame of video or a picture in a stills camera.
These days it the amount of time that the CCD is allowed to capture light through the lens but the term shutter speed has stuck.
Exposure or iris was the size of the opening used to allow light into the camera, bigger opening more light. Now it is all controlled electronically.
When you put a camera in to night veiw mode (except cameras that use infra-red night veiw) the shutter speed is reduced which means the cam has more time to soak up the light, but this means that any movement in the frame will become blurred. Cameras also tend to turn up the gain or ISO. This is a point beyond the normal exposure settings of a camera, the CCD is given more power to capture more light in low light situations, so the dark areas will become exposed and the bright areas will become very bright or overexposed.
The problem that comes with all this is colour noise.
Having done some research on time lapse, it seems the best way to get great results is to use a digital camera controlled by a laptop.
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Edius Pro, ADVC300
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