grainy pics from hvx?

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dogbreath

Member
Can anyone tell me if there is a noise issue with the hvx in certain lighting conditions? I'm ready to lay out $25K on a hvx and underwater housing and obviously a bit concerned especially shooting in low light u/w.
One underwater shooter and one guy shooting a feature have had grainy pics even under bright conditions?

Here are their threads:

http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/index.php?showtopic=21374

http://wetpixel.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t16695.html

Any help would be great.
 
Thanks for the response guys but I still don't know if there's a problem or not.
No G-man I wasn't the operator. It is great vision.
My concern is that both of these guys are basically saying the grain can occur under bright lighting conditions as well as low-light which doesn't make sense to me unless they've accidentally bumped the gain switch (which they say they didn't).
Here is a quote from one of them:

"I recently shot a feature on the HVX using the P2 cards and everything seemed to be going great until last week when I received a call from my producer. They brought me in and I saw some footage that I can only describe as grainy. Several scenes, when blown up to full monitor size had a whole lot of movement going on. It looked as though I had under exposed 16mm film and blew it up huge. Now the main thing is that I don't see any direct correlation between lighting situations or camera gags. some shots are in bright sunlight out in a park, using a ND .9 and a polarizer and stopped down considerably, and others are in a night club scene, clean lens and WFO. but there is no consistency. it is not all of the scenes outside nor all of the low light scenes. All of my external components remained the same for those enviornments and I don't know what I must of changed, possibly in camera, to cause this problem? And I have also considered did I cause this problem? could something like this happen in a bad import to an avid or other non-lin editing equipment?"

Anybody?......anyone?
 
I think the camera is noisy, shut off the AGC (automatic gain control) so the camera does not automatically add grain.. You should be ok after that, plus h.264 adds noise in my opinion...
 
I get noise in bright daylight shots all the time. You really do have to work the camera well in order to get rid of the noise.
 
dogbreath, your not alone on this. I've seen considerable noise in some blacks in very well lit setups. Also in some grey colored trees. I'm thinking it's the nature of the HVX and it's scene files. I recommend doing some testing with different scene files and see what happens. I have acidentally had the gain on before, but I have seen this issue with gain off also.

I think the camera is noisy, shut off the AGC (automatic gain control) so the camera does not automatically add grain.
Click to expand...
THANKS! Mine was on 6, and I didn't even know it. Damn good tip.
 
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My images aren't noisey beyond what other HVXusers are experiencing. I was saying that I thought ya had to be in full-auto mode, instead of manual, to even have AGC on.
 
G-Man said:
TimurCivan-saw your short film. It was fantastic. Were you the cinematographer on that film?
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yea,

Mark Harris, Wrote, Directed, acted and edited. so no its not my film, lol. its his film.



But about noise, i watch all my footage on a 60" 1080P TV. The footage looks FINE. wheni look at the same image, on my LAptop, or a cheap monitor it looks TERRIBLE. The problem is what youre Viewing the footage on. Granted if you underexpose severely you will get Grainy footage. but that will happen to ANY camera. ITs just that the DVX/HVX because of the Cinegamme, are succeptible to that. they need contrast to render a clean image.
 
LOOOOL. I'm just kidding. Really though: B. PRESS CREW.

Better get used to B. Press mang. Most of my noise qualms disappeared when I discovered it.
 
TimurCivan said:
yea,

Mark Harris, Wrote, Directed, acted and edited. so no its not my film, lol. its his film.
Click to expand...

Team effort. We're a good team.

But what's with all that noise in the HVX?????? Jeeze...
 
DVCproHD is a noisy codec and the 1/3" chips enhance it. You can press the blacks, up the coring, stay away from CineD, lower the pedestal, etc. to mask the noise. Part of what you pay for the pleasing gamma/colors is increased noise.



ash =o)
 
also to get the most light. in my scene file the Auto Iris is stopped-down to -3, i put it to -0- so more light comes in through the lens..
 
Thanks guys,

It's good info to work with.
One thing still does concern me, if you read their threads from my first post, is they are saying their seems to be no consistency as to when the noise appears?
 
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