Black background, how to avoid noise in the final product?

[askomiko]

Hi!

I need to do a shoot indoors with a black background. I've noticed that I get quite a bit of noise in the shadow areas, not so much in the 0% black, but around the 4% values (looking at the values the magic lantern shows while shooting). Exporting a web-oriented mp4 from Premiere brings up this noise even more, and makes the noise "blocks" a lot bigger, even with quite high bitrates. So, should I over expose slightly, crush the black to 0% in post, or make my blacks lighter in premiere so that I don't go below say, 5 on the 0-255 scale? Or what?

 

[vision_filmz]

Hi!

I need to do a shoot indoors with a black background. I've noticed that I get quite a bit of noise in the shadow areas, not so much in the 0% black, but around the 4% values (looking at the values the magic lantern shows while shooting). Exporting a web-oriented mp4 from Premiere brings up this noise even more, and makes the noise "blocks" a lot bigger, even with quite high bitrates. So, should I over expose slightly, crush the black to 0% in post, or make my blacks lighter in premiere so that I don't go below say, 5 on the 0-255 scale? Or what?

Light your subject, keep a distance from the background, in post crush the blacks. also while shooting keep your iso low and f stop a f4-f8 if possible.

 

[WhiteMonkey]

h.264 uses less data for the blacks, hence the compression artifacts.

1. underexpose your image slightly
2. use one of the flat profiles, cinestyle, Flaat, Neutral
3. use the histogram to bring your blacks out of the danger zone by setting exposure and lighting
4. crush blacks in post

 

[c3hammer]

I would over expose slightly, never use cinestyle then follow #'s 3 and 4

Shooting at iso 2500 and crushing in post is less noisy than shooting at iso 800 and having to boost in post. If you shoot with cinestyle and a low iso you will double down the issue in my experience with a T3i.

Cheers,
Pete