Noisy in wide angle shots?

[mmaller]

Just received my new HPX250. I've been testing out the camera using various modes as well as comparing AVCI-50 vs AVCI-100
I'm new to the Panasonic systems, but it seems that when my shots are at the wide end of the zoom, they are very noisy.
I would describe it as mosquito type noise. Closer shots at the telephoto end of the zoom don't show this noise in any setting.
Maybe it's a setting that I'm overlooking. I've tried out some of the built in scene files, F3 seems to be the noisiest. Could this be because the detail setting is at +4? in the F3 setting?

I'm shooting outdoors in bright sunlight and have engaged the neutral density filters to keep the f-stop at around 4.0
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Also

I currently have only one 64gig P2 card
I'm about to shoot a long live performance that is in excess of 3 hours and I'm trying to decide if it would be ok to shoot in AVCI-50 vs AVCI-100
Should I just bite the bullet and buy another 64gig P2 card?

[rzr219]

[QUOTE=mmaller;1986117100I currently have only one 64gig P2 card
I'm about to shoot a long live performance that is in excess of 3 hours and I'm trying to decide if it would be ok to shoot in AVCI-50 vs AVCI-100
Should I just bite the bullet and buy another 64gig P2 card?[/QUOTE]

Well if I remember right (I am traveling and dont have my book) if you are going to shoot a solid 3 hours, then you will need another 64GB card and AVCI-50. Unless you are shooting SD, then you will be fine. I also do stage performances and my next one is coming up. you can get a used 64gb card for $525. You get much more bang for your buck getting a 64GB card than a 32 or 16 (its a math thing). Unless you get a ninja or samari around $800 (HDMI 8 bit) to $1500 (SDI 10 bit), but then you can get as long as your hard drive has space, might be a better to spend on a external device? Just a thjought.

As far as the other I havent seen this yet. Also I am guessing you have barreys book and have changed you defult scene settings. The stock settings are in my option really bad.

[videoatlanta]

I used to use up-coming long-form events as a reason to invest in more cards. If you're in this for the long haul and want to be able to take on long shoots with P2, then buy more cards as needed. Soon, you'll have enough for all day shooting.
You will not see much difference with the AVCi50 or 100, don't sweat it.
Get a lens controller like Varizoom too. You'll be so happy you did.

[digitalgecko]

I shoot long events at AVC 50. It looks fine. But yes you will need another P2 card. With 2 64 Gb cards at 100 you get about 2 hours and 20 minutes and at AVC 50 a little over 4 hours.

[brynsank]

Noise at the wide end of the lens - that is very strange indeed. Could you post some frame grabs? I see no technical reason at all for that to be occuring, other than some bizarre concoction of operator error. In any case, some frame grabs might provide some clue as to what kind of noise it is and where it might be coming from.

[mmaller]

I know that many people have stated there is not much of a difference between AVCI-50 vs 100, but to me this doesn't seem to be the case.
I am wondering if those that are making this judgement are looking at the footage on an external monitor?
When viewing on an external monitor (not computer screen) you can clearly see compression artifacts in the AVCI-50 footage.
Of course these compression artifacts are dependent on the content of the footage, less detailed imagery doesn't cause much of a problem but in a complex
scenes they are more obvious.
Now maybe this is due partly to the downsampling to 720p of which I have based this assessment.
Or maybe I am doing something wrong, of which I would happily accept correction.


I am going to post 2 screen grabs of footage that was shot on the HPX250 using AVCI-50 at 720p 24pn.
It is difficult to see the noise without playing the actual footage but I have posted 2 adjacent frames and if you open in an image editing app you
can toggle between the two to see the noise.

Any opinions or criticisms are completely welcome. I would love to be told I am doing something wrong.

[mmaller]

Here is a dropbox link to the frame grabs that were shot at AVCI-50 720-24pn
They are pngs with no added compression.
The archive is about 4megs in size

The frames were exported from a FCP7 timeline. The footage was imported natively and placed into an Apple ProRes 422 timeline.
The footage has some minor Color Correction to account for a bad white balance.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29910403/HPX250%20frames.zip

[brynsank]

That looks like some pretty awful compression... like low quality jpeg almost. I'm going to shoot a quick test off my balcony and see what my hpx250 does.

[brynsank]

Ok so these are hugely unscientific and done in a bit of a rush, but here are some samples from my hpx250. Was too lazy to drag the tripod out (it was in another building...) so the last couple of seconds of each clip are what you're looking at. Certainly doesn't seem to be the same level of noise as in your example.

My settings: Auto focus/iris. WB Preset 5.6k. Scene File F1. Basically set the camera to factory settings. ND 1/64

MXF files straight out of camera, just renamed for quick identification.

https://www.wetransfer.com/dl/3g68hV...660cd2d2f79006

Let me know if that link doesn't work. It will probably go dead in a few days.

[male_man]

FCP doesn't recognize the MXF files. You need to transcode to a quicktime file.