7D Highest recommended ISO with acceptable noise

G

Gene Sung

Veteran
I've just been doing some indoor light tests with a new light kit. I was shooting something at f 2.8 and in this particular situation, I had to bump the ISO up to 500 for proper exposure.

Ideally, ISO 100 would be nice all the time, but not always possible.

In you guy's opinion, what is the highest ISO that the 7D should go, with acceptable noise?

Thanks
 
ISO 500 is nothing to be worried about.

I've shot above 2500 and with a little bit of love from the "Neat Video" plug-in had some very acceptable results.
 
For lowest amount of noise, turn of highlight tone priority and auto lighting optimizer and only use ISO 160, 320, 640, 1250.
 
i dont go over 640 and i use the native ISO's which are the cleanest (160,320,620...and if i REALLY need to 1250)

yes believe it or not 160 is cleaner than 100 and 320 cleaner than 200 and 620 is cleaner than 400 and 500.
 
jambredz said:
i dont go over 640 and i use the native ISO's which are the cleanest (160,320,620...and if i REALLY need to 1250)

yes believe it or not 160 is cleaner than 100 and 320 cleaner than 200 and 620 is cleaner than 400 and 500.
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Actually that is incorrect. I spent a lot of time reading this. Iso increments by 100,200,400,800 Full stop increments are the native iso's. The 1/3 iso use digital filtering to achieve a less noisy image but you lose dynamic range. So 160 to 100 will have less noise but less dynamic range as well. Since that iso increment is not that much you wont be able to tell, but at the higher iso's 1600/3200 range. So for instance if you are recording someone who is wearing all black I would rather use iso 1600 as opposed to 1250, so you can see the full dynamic range because at 1250 it might look like a person is in a complete shadow.

These are from my test. Do some reading on it and you will see what I'm talking about.


FInally to answer the op I have shot at iso 3200 with some acceptable noise but clearly fine and usable for online ( vimeo,youtube,etc. )
 
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Without Neat Video, I do not shoot over ISO1600 on my 7D. I've played around with Neat Video a bit, but have not really used it in any production work yet. It's a really nice tool though. I've just tried to avoid anything over 1600.
 
grimepoch said:
Without Neat Video, I do not shoot over ISO1600 on my 7D. I've played around with Neat Video a bit, but have not really used it in any production work yet. It's a really nice tool though. I've just tried to avoid anything over 1600.
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Neat Video is AWESOME. really saved my hide with AGC accidentally enabled on the XH A1's once or twice
 
Zissou said:
Neat Video is AWESOME. really saved my hide with AGC accidentally enabled on the XH A1's once or twice
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Common Sense would tell me that Neat Video might be correcting the "noise" seen but at what cost? I'm more than sure Neat Video is also removing some other detail from the image as well.
 
life4eva said:
Common Sense would tell me that Neat Video might be correcting the "noise" seen but at what cost? I'm more than sure Neat Video is also removing some other detail from the image as well.
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Have you tried Neat Video? It can really save your butt when the location is simply too dark to shoot at optimum ISO settings, even when you are wide open at f1.4 (which is not recommended in many cases). Yes, you are going to lose a little detail here and there, but which is worse, lots of 'noise' that screws with the detail, or a clean image with the same loss of detail you were losing through noise anyway?

It's really worth creating a custom profile for your camera at different ISO / Gain settings because it can make a big difference to the quality of results and the amount of detail preserved.
 
Exact said:
Have you tried Neat Video? It can really save your butt when the location is simply too dark to shoot at optimum ISO settings, even when you are wide open at f1.4 (which is not recommended in many cases). Yes, you are going to lose a little detail here and there, but which is worse, lots of 'noise' that screws with the detail, or a clean image with the same loss of detail you were losing through noise anyway?

It's really worth creating a custom profile for your camera at different ISO / Gain settings because it can make a big difference to the quality of results and the amount of detail preserved.
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Any free trials of the plug in? I would like to run some tests.
 
Also remember, it's not an all or nothing thing as well. You can adjust have aggressively it works. The first thing I EVER did with it was run some HV30 footage through it a long time ago, and we were AMAZED at how much the more aggressive modes cleaned up.

That said, when I use it, I just use enough to make it acceptable, but not perfect :)
 
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