More light in to the DVX

[trezpasser]

I´m about to shoot a rock-festival in pretty dark conditions with my DVX. Do you think that it would be an advantage to unscrew the plastics in front of the lens to get more light in to the lens?
And what settings would you use to get the best capture without getting it grainy.

[macintosh]

unscrew the plastics? do you mean the lens hood? I don't think it will make that much of a difference but I'm not 100% sure.

As far as settings go, do you have a preference for what mode to shoot in? You'll get the most light shooting in 60i. You could try using 30p and changing the shutter to 1/30th. It will introduce some motion blurring, but nothing too bad. You could probably get away with using 6db of gain. Also, if you plan on increasing your detail levels, make sure to increase your detail coring as well to help smooth out some of the noise. If you have the chance, the best thing to do would be to do some low light tests and find which settings give you a picture that your most happy with.

[trezpasser]

Yepp, Lens-hood i meant =).
so 12db is out of the question i guess? I have to shoot in 60i then. Yeah, I´m about to get some testfootage soon. Maybe i post it here so you can help me decide. Thank you for the answer Macintosh.

[macintosh]

Well I wouldnt completely say that 12db is out of the question. But you probably wouldn't need to use it if your shooting at a stage using a lot of lights often found at music festivals. Especially in dark environments 12db will introduce a lot of noise that can be very distracting to the image on screen. You might not even need to use any gain at all if the stage itself is lit well enough. Once you do your initial tests, I would suggest trying to show up to the show a little bit early to re-test your settings and see if there is some tweaking you can do to achieve an even better image, such as seeing if there really is any need to use gain or a slower shutter speed.

[khmuse]

The mask of the lens is outside of the area of the lens that collects energy which would end end up arriving at CCDs, therefore, there would be zero gain from its removal (other than increased lens flare).

If you are shooting 60i, shutter speeds will not help (nor are they an option) as you are already acquiring energy continuously when in interlaced mode. Your only option to increase sensitivity beyond what occurs naturally in that configuration is to add gain prior to the quantizers via the camera's gain switch.