Grainy/Pixelated Image- Capture format

L

LightSeeker1

New member
Hi,i'm a newbie to this site and the DVX100 in general(so go easy on me). However I have been using it for test footage for a while, and the footage does not come out the way that i think a DVX100A is capable of. I'm basically trying to shoot, edit and put a short movie onto DVD.

THE PROBLEM:
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Grainy/pixelated footage

DESCRIPTION:
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1) As I record footage, the colour viewfinder shows alot of noise/grain in the display.

2) When I capture the footage it still has some grain, and slightly pixelated.

3) If i do anything to the footage, eg MagicBullet to correct the colour, image becomes very pixelated.

4) Once on DVD and playing back on a TV, the movie looks very grain and dirty.

POSSIBLE CAUSES FOR THE ABOVE:
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1) At this stage, I first thought perhaps the dirty image is just caused by dirty camera head, but then that wouldnt affect the viewfinder image would it?
So is this something to do with the GAIN/White Balance?

2) I am capturing the footage as Windows AVI. What is the best format to capture as (for maximum resolution and practical hardrive space)???

3) Any sort of colour correction or change levels, or add amagic bullet filter, the video becomes very pixelated, dunno why. Im using Premiere Pro. Is it because the more times the clip is changed and saved over and over, it deteriorates the image??

4) It doesnt look AS bad on a regular TV, but on a widescreen TV it looks disgustingly grainy. Is this because its stretching the image,or simply because its a bigger TV, the grain shows up more??


Thanks guys,any help would be greatly appreciated(especially on capture formats you guys use).
 
the dvx is going to have grain i dont think it is your heads. also is there pixelization before you color correct? from the way you described it, it only happens when you color correct. if that is the case then i think it is because of settings in your NLE. when you color correct in most NLEs you have to render the clip to make it full quality. when something is done to a clip in and editor usually the program degrades the quality so you can view the clip in realtime. if you have more information about the problem please do tell. i think this should help tho.
 
Hey, you have the A model, which is the noisiest of the product line. B is best, then original, then A is worst.

1) At this stage, I first thought perhaps the dirty image is just caused by dirty camera head, but then that wouldnt affect the viewfinder image would it?
So is this something to do with the GAIN/White Balance?
Click to expand...

Not dirty heads, you'd know if the heads were dirty, you'd get gigantic static blocks all over the screen and the audio woudl sounds jacked up, too.

Is it gain or white balance? Probably yes, among other things.

Never use gain if you don't have to. Use the camera in manual mode with no gain. If it's too dark, add light/open the iris, but don't use gain. Gain=grain=niose.

Accurate white balance helps with noise. As does using good quality lights. The camera is supposedly native 3.2k, so 3.2k lights are the best. You will get more noise using normal household bulbs or halogen lights, or cheap fluorescent bulbs.

Get a white card/gray card and learn to manually white balance properly. Will result in a better image.

Finally, go into the scene settings. Set DETAIL to -7 and CORING to +7. Set MATRIX to NORMAL and GAMMA to BLACK PRESS. This will give you a considerably less noisy picture, and as you play with it, you may want to increase the DETAIL back up a bit if you perceive the image as being too soft.

2) I am capturing the footage as Windows AVI. What is the best format to capture as (for maximum resolution and practical hardrive space)???
Click to expand...

You should be capturing as DV-AVI, which will show up as an AVI file. This is the native camera format and is a bit-for-bit copy of what's on the tape. No quality loss on the captrue as long as you use this format.

3) Any sort of colour correction or change levels, or add amagic bullet filter, the video becomes very pixelated, dunno why. Im using Premiere Pro. Is it because the more times the clip is changed and saved over and over, it deteriorates the image??
Click to expand...

Once you have better images to work with by doing all of the above, the image will take to a bit more color correction before falling apart, but it also won't need as much color correction anyway.

If you are rendering out your corrections and then re-importing, you are recompressing, and that is a bad thing. Try to get all your corrections in one pass and do your final output, so you are only recompressing the image once. Better yet, never render it, go straight out of Premiere to MPEG-2/DVD in a single render.

4) It doesnt look AS bad on a regular TV, but on a widescreen TV it looks disgustingly grainy. Is this because its stretching the image,or simply because its a bigger TV, the grain shows up more??
Click to expand...

Yeh, bigger the TV, the less the image will hold up, that's true of anything. You need to shoot really nice images the right way for it to look good on a big TV.
 
Dougy,
-Yeh it's more grain/noise originally and then gets pixelated after the colour corrections. The pixelation actually becomes really noticable after i export to DVD. I will look into the settings as you suggested thank you.

Joshua,
-Damn wish i knew that about the 'A' before i bought it. It's still a good cam tho.
-I've used a heap of different 'consumer' cams in the past from the beginning of highschool to make vids/short movies, but this is the first 'prosumer' cam i've owned. It's got so many different functions and settings that i have to figure out and get used to. Manuals don't really cut it...that's why i prefer asking those who know (such as you fine folk.hehe).
-I will definately try all the the manual settings that you have shown me; from the white balancing, scene settings to the capturing as DV-AVI.
-As for my premiere project, aslong as i DON'T keep exporting clips as AVI and re-importing; i can still keep updating/saving the actual premiere PROJECT itself, without quality loss right?? (as the editing process will take me several days).


I'd like to thank you both for taking the time to reply, and helping me out. Hopefully i will get better results by applying your advice. Thank you.
 
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