Getting to the bottom of the noise complaints - is it h.264 uncompression software?

Since I release for different formats, and mainly the web right now, I did just that. I found the worst monitor I had (A Dell) and imported footage from my 7D and AF100. This is the process I used to continue to tweak my settings till I was happy.
 
So with Panasonic announcing it's QT plugin for "natively" editing the .mts files in FCP, could this potentially solve people's problems with hardware/software de-compression introducing noise, as Barry suggests?
 
Nothing has ever shown hardware/software decompression to introduce more noise. The issue is relative to gamma settings and color spaces which makes noise already there more visible (or not).
 
I'm viewing footage (FCP timeline) on a calibrated Dell LCD monitor fed via HDMI from a Matrox LE. I see TONS of noise at ISO 1600 and lots at 800 and some at 200. When you look at a normal computer monitor the overall brightness is usually lower than a TV so the noise is hidden in the crushed blacks. Once you get out of computer gamma and into HD or worse, NTSC, you see all the crap people are talking about.

I'm learning to underexpose this camera just a bit because of the noise and also because there's not as much latitude as my 5D. When things blowout, they really are gone. I shoot with the Norm2 matrix but I don't see much of a knee.
 
By default, on Mac machines at least, the overall brightness of a monitor is HIGHER not LOWER. The factory set gamma setting on OSX is MUCH higher. In fact, when you go to the display calibration settings, it has a setting if you are doing video work for televisions.

I just mention this for clarity in case you are on a PC and others have a question.

Also, pertaining to the noise, drop your detail. The camera is doing too much detail enhancement by default (in my opinion) and it makes a mess of the noise. Without question, in video mode, my AF100 has more lattitude than my 7D. I've tested it. What I see is more detail into the shadows.
 
Rick, have you had similar issues with a HVX in different view scenarios on different monitors? I can't tell you that I have. Sure I have seen slight differences in the look of the footage, but not to this extreme. I have seen it looking better after adapting the settings seen here as well as tweaking to my preference from there. But the difference in regular monitor and HD television is still pretty staggering to me. Yesterday, I spent a few hours cala-birthing a scene file recipe looking for the best settings...seemed that in LED monitor via hdmi I was able to tame noise in varying degrees moving from -7 to +7. However, I couldn't see much difference in noise from the screen via HDMI.(I was also varying different file settings in the same instance looking for what suited my taste) Obviously from the screen shots I posted last week viewing footage from a crappy laptop there was plenty aliasing visible in dark contrasted areas with really noisy blacks and mids. This was no doubt that this was due to the high detail level along with a pushed coring level...But I couldn't see how bad it was on my PC via Premiere, only on a sony vaio viewing it from the card reader was I able to take a screen shot of what I was seeing and post it here...and on my cinema display at work the footage looked really clean. So far the AF100 for me is very clean in the light, outdoors or in a scene that is lit softly and evenly. But even on a HDTV in areas that are out of focus I see odd grain mainly in the reds, mid blacks
These grains aren't circular type of tiny grain I have experienced, or even the kind of grain that people actually put it via after effects for a film look. I wish I could take a screen shot of my television so I can better describe this. I am still tweaking. Looks like a weekend full of tweaking. i know and believe that I can get less grain coming out of this bad boy. I have seen it even in compressed footage on vimeo. It looks cleaner then what I am experiencing in some instances. And don't get me wrong. I can deal with grain my xha1 had grain. But the grain looked fine...it wasn't oddly shapen...maybe this new type of grain I am seeing will take some getting used to. Time will tell I guess. I will post up some test footy this weekend for those that would like to offer further insight.
 
I know the noise you speak of, and yes I agree it is very different than say even the 7D noise which looks similar to if you add colored noise of around 1% in after effects. I've spent a lot of time matching noise in scenes for VFX work for our web series.

That said, the first thing I noticed on my 7D compared to the AF100 is that it was much noisier than I had realized looking 1:1, although, that noise was more pleasant compared to default settings of AF100 and I determined that the sharpness on the AF100 at 0 was REALLY high, more so than I would have expected. Once I dialed that down and adjusted the coring I was happier. I also dropped the chroma down as I said because I think the camera is too saturated that what I was looking at.

When I hook up the AF100 and 7D and record under any ISO, I am happy with my settings and I think that there can be actually less noise in the AF100 footage from what I have seen. So much so that I added some noise back in to help reduce some of the banding (posterization) due to how clean the image was. Most videos I see with AF100 and lots of noise, I know right away they have their detail too high. That dancing monochromatic noise is the first indication. I've seen shots at 3200ISO that others have done that I was AMAZED at the quality (and add the GH2 to that list as well). MUCH cleaner than the 7D. In fact, I almost NEVER go above 1600ISO on the 7D. When I looked at 1600 on the AF100, I was shocked at how clean it is.

The thing is, we know the camera shoots somewhere just below 800 lines of resolution. You can fake more detail out of the camera with the detail setting, but that comes at a price of noise enhancement. I prefer to have a little (-5 detail) but I find that at those settings, the camera is outresolving my 7D. Even further, it is DEFINITELY giving me more into the blacks.

I've shot on an HVX200 and I can say, the AF100 BLOWS the HVX200 out of the water in the noise department. We always had to rent a small sun to light our scenes to get them clean indoors. I am NOT seeing that limitation with the AF100. At all.

Even with blowing out, you can tame those blowouts with easy color correction from what I have seen. Is it as graceful as the 7D? No, but it is very fixable. After looking at blowouts on many other cameras, I find that once again, the AF100 is just too saturated to me. Once I dial that back, bam, problem solved.

In the end, it's all a taste thing. I was one of the first vocal complainers about the AF100 noise from day one. I own an AF100 and I still do, if that means anything. I'm still testing as I am waiting for the Birger adapter before shooting anything, but so far, it is a very capable tool that requires you to know how it works. It's not point and shoot. It's not perfect, but then again, neither am I, so we get along great! :)

Take a look at editman's settings, as his were my starting point. He also has posted in the scene file thread a 5D scene setting as well.

Also, the biggest problem I am seeing people have is how to expose. The curves in the AF100 are different than say the 5D or 7D. Where skin needs to be for you is really something to test out. I like Cine-V because it crushes the blacks some and I feel with the chroma down, gives me the most range.
 
Verse is Sooooo clean. It's virtually grainless. I wonder if it was mostly post technique that was able to get it so clean or if it was that clean out of cam.
 
artyswiss said:
Verse is Sooooo clean. It's virtually grainless. I wonder if it was mostly post technique that was able to get it so clean or if it was that clean out of cam.
Click to expand...
That's what it looked like on the monitors when we were shooting it. You can ask the crew -- I dragged probably every single one of 'em over to the monitor and begged them, please, show me ANY noise. A N Y. Because there wasn't any. There was maybe one shot that had some, but the rest was amazingly clean.

As for a direct comparison with the EX1, I'd have to do a side-by-side.

I can say that I just got out of "The Adjustment Bureau" and saw plenty of scenes in it which were much grainier than anything I've ever seen out of an AF100.
 
I just watched it on one of my old samsung syncmaster lcd monitors that isn't calibrated and I still can't find any significant grain. amazing. Well done.
 
the vimeo verse I found too clean, polished denoised clean.
made me consider for a second if I'd enjoy the image from the AF.

and then I downloaded the prores, and found a texture to the original footage that was a lovely quality.

I'm coming from an SGPro/HVX combo, and I loved the texture on that.

or HP5 pushed 2 stops, and printed multigrade 4 or 5. feel that grain...
 
I wonder what it will do to the picture if the bitrate was 50 i.s.o. 24. If the G1 was hacked, perhaps an angel can hack the AF100 too.
 
What about read/write rates? I thought the fastest sdxc was 45mbps? That will effect any bitrate increase to the sd card eh?
 
Barry, could this be why the Canon DSLRs seem (to me) to end up much cleaner and smoother then the AF100? I know that there's other factors like them being soft to begin with and such, but it seems to me that the 5D always wins (on my computer). Just wondering if maybe the Canon DSLRs are in a position codec wise where they're decoded properly and things look fine...
 
The point of this thread is more to say that a lot of the time it IS clean...even if it doesn't look clean on the majority of our displays. Tested some "noisy" stuff last night on my television...looked brilliant. None of the nasty chunks that I was seeing on my computer display.
 
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