Is there any noise or not?

M

matoliki

Member
I have a shot footage at ISO 100 (T2i), and when I first saw it on my laptop, I noticed significant noise on actors black jacket. You can watch bad take at --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aggbqMJkShg
But today I bought a mini-hdmi cable, and when I was testing this video on tv, the noise was gone.
Now, I have a lot of questions, so if you could please help me:
Is there any noise, and where is it coming from?
What is the maximum that can be drawn from these footage?
 
Do not trust laptop LCDs, especially MacBookPro LCDs! My MBP always looks more noisy than the cinema display or TV.
 
Newer monitors lie to you by boosting signals in darker areas. TV sets are a different setup altogether. What you may have been seeing on your laptop was actually crushed blacks, whose signal the laptop's screen was boosting to be more readable, generating noise, but were still crushed on the TV.

To check if this is the case, select your clip in FCP, go to Tools->Vectorscopes->Waveform, I think it is. You should be able to tell from that if you've dipped below 0 IRE. If so, you're crushing the blacks, and it's possible the laptop is just adding gain to those blacks, which produces noise.
 
Thank you very much for your help. Thanks to you I tested the footage on more than one monitor and saw that sometimes there's noise, and sometimes there isn't any. I couldn't test it on vectorscope yet, cause my computer is being repaired, but I think it's very likable that your conclusions are correct.
Do you have any advice about processing the footage in order to make it noise free on most monitors?
 
matoliki said:
Do you have any advice about processing the footage in order to make it noise free on most monitors?
Click to expand...

Yea. When you color correct in FCP, pay attention to your waveform. If you are crushing the blacks, some monitors will produce noise in the blacks and some will just be pure jet black nonsense. I would recommend not dipping below 5% (or 5 IRE) on your waveform, so the majority of television screens can still show detail in the blacks.
 
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