How I deal with noise

[Green Hornet]

I just got this camera, and am no expert.

Today, I was testing the camera, by taping some ducks on a pond.
What I noticed was that my footage looked very muddy and underexposed in premiere.

Then I tried adjusting the lcd sceen, and viewfinder by turning DOWN the brightness. I then went back to the pond, and shot more of the same.

This footage looked very nice.
I brought it back in premiere, and felt it could use more saturation, less contrast.

My conclusion is that the camera is underexposing the image by about a third to a half stop, and that's when I see the most noise. When I turned down the lcd and viewfinder brightness, that made me naturally add more exposure, resulting in a much better picture.


I would like to later do similiar tests with a light meter.
That way I can get more repeatable exposures.
The viewfinder/lcd does not seem to do a good job showing correct exposure.
This is not a cure all, but it certainly helped me get the best image in cine d.

Some of the apparent noise in camera, actually went away by decreasing the brightness of the lcd.
In my case, it seems as if the lcd has noise, that really is not in the final footage (I do realize there is some noise in the footage, just stating that, in my case, some of what I see is in the lcd)

 

[Jack Daniel Stanley]

it's a general rule to get as much light as possible into your camera with DV without overexposing. THis gives the camera more information to work with and reduces noise. Also you can always bring things down in post without adding noise (again unless its blown out then there's no information there to pull out) but you can't make things brighter beyong a point without increasing noise.

you should use a lcd hood or use the eyepiece for exposing outside

you can also adjust the autoexposure to to under expose or over expose 1or 2 stops regularly

using "normal"cinegama also reduces noise

unless you are doing something wonky or have a wonly camera settng shooting outside in daylight should be virtyually noiseless

you should only ever have a noise problem if you are shooting in low light

make sure your camera is also adusted so the GAIN never comes into play, if you need to adjust the gain stop filming for the day on an outside shoot and add more light for an inside shoot

 

[n8ture]

I like to set my zebras fairly high then just expose until they start to show then back off a little.
When I was shooting in snow I set them to 100 then opened up until they started showing then backed them off a bit.
I think I have my two settings at 100 and 90 or 100 and 95. It's worked pretty slick for me so far.

 

[Green Hornet]

I guess what my camera seems to do is show an image that looked ok on the lcd, but when played back through an nle, it is slightly underexposed.
I set the image to look slightly dark, and then I open up, and it looks good on both the nle and camera.

As for the zebras, my camera looks best with a small amount of zebras displaying.
If I back off, it doesn't so much induce noise, but the image looks really flat.

I started this thread implying noise, when I really was just refering to a flat image compared to a more vibrant one by slightly increasing the exposure.

 

[translumination]

zebra's

zebra's

Just a question about using zebras on skin tone.

I know people set skin tones so that the facial highligts just start showing at 70% (or so) zebra's. Now if you always set your zebra's to this setting wouldnt it always make people's faces look like the same time of the day all the time? Obviously thats not what you want to do as people's skin tones vary with the time and place you are setting the scene at. So how do people use the zebra's besides preventing blowup at 100%?

 

[joe 1008]

I wouldn´t use the zebra for defining the tonality of skin in diferent daytimes. The position of the lightsource (the sun or/and artificial light) is more important + the colour of the light. Deep, reddish lightsource = early morning or late afternoon. High ,bluish lightsource = midday. Use the zebra only to achiev a perfectly exposured image.