Kolor-Pikker
Well-known member
Yesterday, and for a short while today, I thought about the 3xx's often talked about noise qualities and decided to mess around with the camera a bit to confirm or debunk some of the things I've learned about this camera from here and around.
Disregarding the glitchy PAP 1 filter, some people play with gamma or master pedestal to find a way around the 3xx's shadow noise, usually crushing up the shadows to get a clean look, or using a contrasty gamma like B-press. I know that this isn't a film-like camera, but not really content to stick to settings that royally blow highlights and shadows, I saved a few different profiles on my camera and recorded a few scenes while switching through the scene file wheel so I could later scrub through the footage and compare the settings, but looking at the files on my computer I found that there was surprisingly little difference between settings that I thought were drastically different (in theory) before.
While the scene settings did seem more pleasing in certain situations than others, the lighting and distribution of tones in the image did have a very big say in noise quality. Particularly, there appears to be a tonal range just between the shadows and midtones that seems particularly susceptible to some sort of "fuzzyness", usually if the subject is back-lit, and especially on flat, neutral areas.
As I'm typing this, I'm looking a few clips that I graded the heck out of, recorded with a scene file I setup to maximize all the DR I could get from the camera in 1080p:
-3 gain
Master ped: +60
Gamma: Cinelike D,
Knee: Low
Matrix: Fluo
I did other minor adjustments, but overall the image turned out quite noise-free, which I found rather odd, because in some other circumstances, even when using contrasty settings as suggested by other people, it produced images with noticeable noise in the image, and didn't take color correction very well. Checking the color values of the most affected areas, this seems to be around in the 50~110 RGB range, varying somewhat depending on the scene file, but not very much.
So from my point of view it seems that this camera's weakness are darkish areas that are in shade, but are not shadow, so my theory is that people use heavy contrast to create a faster transition through this problem area, when in reality what I think needs to be done is making sure there is a minimum of "fill light", the subjects should be brightly lit and stay above 40 IRE or so, and if there is any shadow it should drop off quickly to a pretty dark level.
Discuss!
Disregarding the glitchy PAP 1 filter, some people play with gamma or master pedestal to find a way around the 3xx's shadow noise, usually crushing up the shadows to get a clean look, or using a contrasty gamma like B-press. I know that this isn't a film-like camera, but not really content to stick to settings that royally blow highlights and shadows, I saved a few different profiles on my camera and recorded a few scenes while switching through the scene file wheel so I could later scrub through the footage and compare the settings, but looking at the files on my computer I found that there was surprisingly little difference between settings that I thought were drastically different (in theory) before.
While the scene settings did seem more pleasing in certain situations than others, the lighting and distribution of tones in the image did have a very big say in noise quality. Particularly, there appears to be a tonal range just between the shadows and midtones that seems particularly susceptible to some sort of "fuzzyness", usually if the subject is back-lit, and especially on flat, neutral areas.
As I'm typing this, I'm looking a few clips that I graded the heck out of, recorded with a scene file I setup to maximize all the DR I could get from the camera in 1080p:
-3 gain
Master ped: +60
Gamma: Cinelike D,
Knee: Low
Matrix: Fluo
I did other minor adjustments, but overall the image turned out quite noise-free, which I found rather odd, because in some other circumstances, even when using contrasty settings as suggested by other people, it produced images with noticeable noise in the image, and didn't take color correction very well. Checking the color values of the most affected areas, this seems to be around in the 50~110 RGB range, varying somewhat depending on the scene file, but not very much.
So from my point of view it seems that this camera's weakness are darkish areas that are in shade, but are not shadow, so my theory is that people use heavy contrast to create a faster transition through this problem area, when in reality what I think needs to be done is making sure there is a minimum of "fill light", the subjects should be brightly lit and stay above 40 IRE or so, and if there is any shadow it should drop off quickly to a pretty dark level.
Discuss!
Last edited:
