less grainy night

[Guest]

I'm in the process of shooting low bufget feature where most of the shoots take place at night. I love it because despite low budget we still manage to get **** load of cool shots. But... Say i have a bedroom scene and i light it from outside with soft blue light ... how do i get rid of graininess in the dar areas?

 

[matthewd5]

Re: less grainy night


well i had zero night time experience until recently...

i didn't gain much but i did learn a few things on a short that i spent a few nights shooting test footage for...

i shot almost all of it at night and it helped to throw less light than you thought you needed, some of the scenes i found out i overlit it and it didn't look natural, i learned from folks on here who looked at my footage and said it didn't look like night, it looked like overlit night.

that said if you want a night look...

if you can shoot during the day i had one scene that was my favorite, i had 3 HUGE windows to deal with, over 3 feet wide and at least 10 feet tall (a old school converted to condo's)

i had to shoot at this location in the daytime so i got 3 long piece of fabric and covered 90% of the windows and played with the iris carefully and i got the most beautiful looking "night scene".

compare the stuff that was obviously shot at night and the "night time" scene in the condo...my hardest thing was getting the lights to where i had to shoot, shooting in one location was a lot easier, getting power was the hardest part.

http://www.cluelessandlark.org/hit-and-run-partial.wmv

matthew

 

[sonnyboo]

Re: less grainy night

[quote author=Patryk Rebisz link=board=news;num=1099980463;start=0#0 date=11/08/04 at 22:07:40]I'm in the process of shooting low bufget feature where most of the shoots take place at night. I love it because despite low budget we still manage to get **** load of cool shots. But... Say i have a bedroom scene and i light it from outside with soft blue light ... how do i get rid of graininess in the dar areas?[/quote]

Open the Iris all the way (where it says OPEN), and do NOT use the +6db or 12db gain. The gain will brighten up the image, but that's also causing the grain issue.

 

[taubkin]

Re: less grainy night

I don't think there's a way out of it. the DVX is a pretty noisy camera, and the blue channel is the noisier. Your best bet would be turning detail coring down 1- points, and keeping away from the CINE matrix. You can use cinegamma (regular) and adding a little chroma level 1-2 points to compensate. I think that's the recipe for the cleanest possible image. Also, use the 3200 color temp preset, and couple it with a conversion filter to get daylight-temperature shots.

 

[avr]

Re: less grainy night

Taubkin, when you answered, you refer to chroma level +1 ó +2 and to detail coring -1?
Thank you

 

[SirAllen]

Re: less grainy night

I'd take detail down to -3 or so, drop the chroma level to -3 or so, take a few off the color temp (~-2) to reduce the blue channel, and set the matrix to normal. You can also try playing with the normal and low gamma, but I generally use cine-like. Also play with the master ped to fine tune the grain out, but you can always crush blacks in post as well. Works well for me.

Another thing you can do instead of messing with the color temp is to white balance against something bluish white to warm it up and reduce the noisy blue channel.

 

[travis]

Re: less grainy night

SirAllen, If you turn down the color temp, Does it affects to all colours (not just blue) right?
I mean, would it be good to turn down color temp and also white balanca against some bluish surface.
Just wondering.
I did discover how noisy is the blue channel.
I was doing some test for a black and white short. So i played in post with the color mix effect (like a channel mixer in any nle) in avid before desatured the footage.
When i left just the blue channel the image was incredible noisy. At the end i see a better b&W picture going to red and green and almost leaving to zero the blue channel. And after that desaturated the footage.
I did that test with a non white balance (the 3200 preset)
I will be doing some more test with a bluish white balance. So hopefully i will decrease the manipulation in post.

 

[SirAllen]

Re: less grainy night

The color temp is added after white balancing, so even if you manually WB with your color temp set on -7 everything will be redish. As far as color temp affecting all the colors, I believe it does. I haven't analyzed it closely on the scopes but it's definitely a shift into the red or into the blue, and I'd imagine at the very least those two channels are affected although I'm not sure about green.

 

[sojrn]

Re: less grainy night

Lighting ratios will help too. The trick is to light the darkness.