just got DVX100b and stressing..

[daysgo_by]

Hi, i just got Panasonic AGDVX100b.. and played around with it last few days,,, i noticed there is alot of digital grain/noise.. i made sure gain wasn't set to mid or high.. it was around sunset time. noise is too much that i'm considering changing to sony.. is this common problem with dvx100b?
as for head cleaning,, it's straight out of box and digital noise/grain seems to pop out sort of randomly..
anyone know a solution to this problem??
i shot with my friend's sony fx1 before and it produced very clean image..
what am i doing wrong???
help plzzzz

[deliciousgroove]

Nature of the beast. These cameras don't handle well in low light. often times creating ablueish toned noise. When the lighting is right though I have not seen another camera for the price even come close to beating it.

[Barry_S]

Something sounds off because the DVX is pretty clean with the gain down. I think you're going to just have to roll up your sleeves and experiment with the scene file settings. There are a lot of archived posts that discuss those settings, so you might want to do a few searches.

[daysgo_by]

hi thanks for the reply, the setting when i noticed too much noise/grain wasn't a really low light setting. it was in the shade during sunset and in the shade during cloudy day, but enough diffused light. I went to the clip section of the forum to check out other people's work and one of them i saw was Smelti? i do'nt know if that's correctly spelling for his user name.. but smelti's photographer intro footage he shot.. i didn't find any noise that matches the one that i'm having problem with.. so,, i'm not sure what to do at this point.
will other brand have same problem as welll?

[Joshua Provost]

Hey, the DVX line is a bit noisier by default than many other cameras in it's class. Most report that it is pleasing like film grain.

If you want to do something about it, lower the two Detail settings in the scene file, and raise the Coring setting. How much you raise/lower is up to you, but this will help. This will have the added benefit of reducing sharpening artifacts.

Also, check which GAMMA curve you are using. CINE_D is the noisiest curve of them all.

[gco]

I found that setting Color Matrix to NORM instead of CINELIKE made a huge diff in low light and shade.

[cardmaverick]

My biggest tip is to just expose as high up as you can without blowing the highlights. Light in such a way that your scenes contrast isn't greater than about 4 stops. Keep the pedestal at 0 or slightly raise it (DV is fragile, so pedestal raising can only go so far, same for pedestal crushing to...). In post, darken the footage. Go easy on the contrast too, that can increase the visibility of the cameras noise... blah.

[wrxguy]

Mess with all the scene settings, and if you have the cash, I HIGHLY recomend getting Barry's book, you can find it for sale on the site. It is like 70 bucks but it will deffinitly allow you to get the most out of your dvx. It really goes and breaks down all the scene file settings and is very helpful.

The dvd it comes with also gives a very good visual representation of what each scene file settings do.