Canon xf100 in low light

[lucylittles]

Hi-

I know much has been posted about this - but I am getting bogged down in information and hoping someone might have a simple answer.

Just got an xf100 and we are shooing in a theater in a very low light situation - it is dark but there are pockets of focused light. We tested on the auto settings - but the camera kept wanting to push the Gain to very high levels 12-24db - resulting in very grainy footage. We are now doing some tests with a fixed gain of 0 of -3 and don't know how that will go...

We have loaded some custom settings (from cowpunk52) - plus some of Lou Bruno suggestions on DVinfo - but again trying to assimilate all the info is quite tricky. We are running out of time to test - so the variety of possible combinations is quite daunting.

So, does anyone have a pretty full-proof idea for settings? We are shooting 1920x1080, 24p, 50mps, and with the gain at -3 the shutter was hovering around 1.8 and the shutter at 1/24 (although we were playing with manually adjusting those as well).

Hope this makes sense - its been a long day and - I am a bit jet lagged - so let me know whats unclear.

Thanks!

[Exact]

You are running gain at -3 in a dark place? Crazy!

We will normally run gain at 0 if there is enough light but have the alternative gain settings to +3 and +6. We never use above +6 and never EVER run on AUTO. Never ever. It will try to average the scene at 18% grey and that's just silly.

Gain of +6 will often require a dose of Neat Video to clean it up, but otherwise it's usable. +3 can often be used without noise reduction if you get good exposure.