Discovery? A curious thing about ISOs and exposure compensation

[Dazza]

Not sure if anyone else has noticed. But I was playing AUTOiso (thanks mpgxsvcd) on the S exposure settings yesterday night in lowlight with the 14-140mm lens and was getting better more lit exposure than in ISO 3200

Now what I found out is that if I pushed up the exposure compensation to +3 it would finally be the same exposure on the scene.

So what does this mean?

I'm effectively getting far more than 3200 ISO something that isn't possible on M exposure settings.

Now I thought it would be significantly noisier than 3200 ISO but it isn't and it gives you options where you might otherwise have none. So at +3 stops exposure would you effectively be getting 25600 ISO ???

EDIT : This was with the GH2 but it should apply to the GH1, if not all the G series, aswell

 

[swyzlstyx]

Yeah, you can use exposure compensation to bump the GH1 to what appears to be ISO 3200. (Otherwise, it defaults to ISO 1500 as the highest setting for video.)

 

[Psynema]

Yes, I found this out and had a thread about a year ago.

 

[Dazza]

DVXuser search disfunction strikes again.................

Makes you wonder why Panasonic didn't allow manual selection of the higher ISOs in M exposure mode. For what it's worth I think it's far more usable on the GH2 than the GH1

 

[Dazza]

Ah thanks for that I found the older threads using google to search DVXuser, far better

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...o)-workaround&highlight=exposure+compensation

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?191407-Slow-Shutter-clarification

Though with the GH2 you can't pick a shutter speed lower than 1/25 in any automatic exposure mode even when turning on MF. And it's not 3 stops it's only 1 meaning 6400ISO, still handy.

 

[Cosimo Bullo]

Thank you for posting this, we'd seen it too, but hadn't put two and two together!

 

[shaveblog]

I've compared shooting video in this mode -- Shutter priority with and without Auto-ISO -- to shooting in Creative Movie mode, both aided and abetted by the manual video hack, of course. I found that while S-priority does make for brighter exposure, it seems to do so by significantly upping the ISO to levels where noise becomes intolerable. Shooting in Creative Movie mode with manual shutter results in a much dimmer LCD view and perhaps not quite as brightly exposed footage, but if I stay below ISO 500 (I'm shooting GF13 so extrapolate ISO ceiling as needed) the image is much cleaner and free of noise than if I'd shot in S-priority. I actually started out shooting video the way you guys describe, but the results in low light settings were so ungodly noisy I bought Neat Video's plugin for FCP, and even then the noise was sometimes too egregious to fix. One of Barry Green's posts elsewhere advised something along the lines of "switch to Creative Movie mode and never leave it", so I tried it and got much cleaner results, even if the LCD is much dimmer while shooting.

Curious if any of you have had this experience, or if it's endemic to the GF1 and not applicable to the GH series.