Night/Lo-Light DVX100 vs HVX200

A

Ainami

New member
Hello all,

I've read several posts concerning the challenges that 1/3" HD cameras have with low light conditions. I'm planning a feature film that has a lot of night scenes. Actual filming will either be done at night with lighting or during the day with day-as-night filters. Either way, we are looking at less light into the lens.

Is it worth it to move forward with using the HVX-200 for this film? Compared to the DVX, I'll be getting a lot more low-light noise and will have crushed blacks. Howver, if I go to the DVX-100, I'll be losing the HD resolution.

Anyone have any experience or opinions on this?

-Aaron
 
The first important thing to realize is that night scene doesn't equal "less light." The DVX handles low light better than the HVX but it's still not going to look good unless you light it adequately.
 
I 2nd Jade8472

The 'crushed blacks' is going to depend on your gamma setting. Plus if you decide to downconvert to sd you can hide a lot of noise without losing relative sharpness.

I really love the HVX in day for night, although I never used the DVX for that purpose.
 
Yes. I tend to actually want to have some big lights on exterior night scenes to get the rim lighting and accent lighting and then let the scene fall off into shadows. Just always try to remember to not but a blue tint on the lights.. an old film professor hated that so I try not to do that... A couple of HMIS and some fill and bingo.
 
Well HMIs are daylight balanced, so technically you're kinda bluing your lights there Justyn.

My advice is to remember that night does not mean low light. Light your subjects at a higher contrast ratio than you would for daylight, and light your background. Create depth, throw some light into the trees that are 40ft away and maybe a light in-between with a brachalorus/cucalorus or whatever they calling those things. By lighting some of your background, you create depth and your night scenes will not look like your characters are in a stage doing a play.
 
Yeah I know that they are.. but with some white balancing and NOT adding blue gels.. get away with it well. I'd like to have 5k and 10ks but I don't have a gennie and usually can only get HMI.. so they do it well...


Good advice for that... that's what I do... keep it contrasty but with details shown and seperated
 
I know what you are saying Prof... just his pet peeve about the fact that light at night isn't blue. He said that bigtime DP's were responsible for creating the look of cool nighttime.. I personally think it's whatever fits.. but his voice does ring out everytime we do it...
 
It could seem incredible, but the HVX noise is not the noise we were used to.
It's ROUGH COLOR GRADING STEPS with random threshold.
What does it mean? that the HVX looks like the early Plasma TV posts: few colors, with rough color steps.
So no matter what setting you use, no matter how much light you use, those rough steps will always be there. You can MASK them with some tricks.

Here some examples:

Grab 1 is an uncompressed frame.

Grab2 is a zoom (rise the monitor lighness to see the huge color steps))

This native 1080 clip (right click for download) shows (no CC) that you can mask some noise.


.
 
Thanks all for your input. The HMIs are an interesting idea, but I won't have these in the budget. Looking at things again, it's possible that I may want to crush the blacks in certain scenes. I'll just have to get out there and work with it.
 
Ainami... I used to think that too, but you can usually find them to rent for about 100-150 per day and can usually get them for the week for maybe 300-400 each and they are really awesome lights and you can use them on household circuits or off a 2k generator which is usually what I rent as well.... Good luck and show us the footage when you pop them out... Did you see that Christian film on the graps thread... all night footage.. was really nicely shot and I'd go ahead and PM him for advice... turned out sweet and seems like a cool guy.
 
Hi Justyn. I'll keep that in mind. I think the only scene that I would need those HMIs for can be shot over one weekend. This is still very early in the process, as I am only 30 pages into the script right now. Actual production won't occur until sometime next year, but I'll start posting more as we get closer and have an actual website.
 
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