less grain?

T

thompson

Member
I love the canon xh a1 but i need a lot of light to get rid of grain, any dark sections always seem to gather quite a bit of grain...recently I've seen some footage shot with the A1 in low light and there was no grain at all! How do they do this?

Before you say it, I turned off autogain, set it at -3
 
read the manual and it will tell you how to create custom presets to adjust dark areas of the image. Some people crush the blacks in post while color correcting to take the gain out of those areas....I do that.
 
We shoot flat on the day then in post lower the Gamma values to crush blacks and increase gain which gets rid of grain while giving a slightly sharper & more contrasty image.

I've never understood why HDV is trashed as a consumer codec; we get a lot more latitude out of Canon HDV than we ever did with SD out of our DVX. I mean adding gain in post to low light image from the DVX was just never considered!

The A1 ROCKS!!!
 
yeah...today i was editing some footage from a trip and I thought the highlights were blown out. I color corrected it to bring it down and was amazed that there was still detail in the highlights.....but its a very fine line of blown out and bright just to warn.
 
wes said:
yeah...today i was editing some footage from a trip and I thought the highlights were blown out. I color corrected it to bring it down and was amazed that there was still detail in the highlights.....but its a very fine line of blown out and bright just to warn.
Click to expand...

yeah I noticed it has an impressive dynamic range too...I thought I had ruined some shots but the detail was still in the overexposed parts, pretty impressive..

Evro you are saying you actually increase the gain to remove the grain? I thought it was the opposite?!
 
thompson said:
Evro you are saying you actually increase the gain to remove the grain? I thought it was the opposite?!
Click to expand...

You read it right :) I know that it sounds wrong - but generally speaking, noise looks worse in darker shades, whereas in the highlight you don't notice noise until it's really bad.

Sony Vegas (like most NLE's) allows you to lower gamma (and it's offset value) to crush the noise in the blacks and then you raise the gain a little to emphasise the highlights. It's a technique I've been using since I got my XH-A1 and it works beautifully. Keep in mind there's noisy footage & then there's really noisy footage (like using AGC in low light) that no matter of tweaking will fix.

Is that explanation clear or still a bit noisy ;)
 
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