Low light digital artifacting?

I

iceycat

Member
I am a brand new AF-100 user. Recently shot some footage that was in somewhat low lighting conditions. Camera was on all default settings as this was the first time I had ever used it. I probably should have had some gain on for lower light, but I didn't so I'm not sure what ISO that would sit at. I was using the Lumix 14-140 lens that came with my AF-100, also iris was up all the way.

In post I noticed the video was even darker than I thought it was going to be. Here's the big thing though, there seemed to be digital artifacting that would glitch in and out around the edges of things as well as in the background where things were darker. Also at one point my audio just went away entirely during my recording (didn't notice it until importing footage in my editor (Premiere Pro CS4) I should have had 2 clips, yet I had 4 on my card. I left the card in contiuous record for about 45 minutes while I just moved the tripod around, how did my 2nd clip split into three clips? Why did I have an audio drop out in the middle of it that came back after a few minutes even though I didn't mess with the mic inputs at all?

Any help on these confusing things I encountered my first time using this camera would be really appreciated. I am most worried about the digital artifacting, is this a byproduct of low light conditions and the AVCHD compression codec or something? Also kind of worried about my clip getting parsed up into different chucnks like that. What if that happened during a key scene I couldn't reshoot? Half the performance on one clip, half on the other? No way!
 
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The biggest advice I can give you is... Spend the time to read the manual and get familiar with your new camera.

All the Best!

Dave
 
Well yes, obviously read the manual. It doesn't however seem to talk about this digital artifacting issue I'm encountering. I also didn't see anything about my memory card being parsed or whatever is happening ot it with the multiple footage breaks during continuous shooting. This is where people who know the camera can be more useful than the manual. If manual doesn't talk about the compression artifacting I'm seeing, or the card being parsed how can the manual help me there?

Maybe someone can say, oh I'm familiar with that, it means you have a bad memory card, or yes the codec does that sometimes, just do XYZ to deal with that.....
 
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Can you post a clip of the digital artifacting?

Regarding the clip being split, please use google or search these forums. This has been covered about a thousand times and happens with ALL tapeless cameras.

Please also read Adobe's whitepapers on AVCHD/Premiere workflow.

Did you import the AVCHD clips properly or did you just drag the .MTS files over?

Your lens is not a good lens for low light. It's a F 4 - 5.8 so....that might be your problem.
 
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Under exposed footage tends to get noisy, did you get Barry's Book. If not try to get it and maybe even his DVD, I think it is out now.

Just playing around with the camera to get familiar is the only way to learn. Get familiar with the scopes they are very helpful. The AF100 is capable of very good clean video, but you have to find the settings you like.

Were your audio glitches with an external mic? If so check the cables very carefully, bad cables are quite common. If it was just on the internal mic, w/o any changes in settings you may have a faulty camera, get a replacement from your dealer, or contact Pany. Also if you still have the clip with audio glitch, play it back in the camera to make sure nothing happened in the transfer. Sometimes glitches happen in computers when playing back. It could be a HD problem.

Also bear in mind that watching footage on a computer monitor is not the best way, a lot of noise can be added by scaling and playback glitches. An evaluation monitor is the best, preferable a HDSDI monitor. I usually set up and test a new camera by hooking it up directly to a calibrated HDSDI pro Monitor and try different settings and exposure while watching the monitor and learning how it looks on the LCD and VF on the camera when you have good exposure. This is also the best way to find the scene file settings you like. This is much easier than going back and forth between the camera and a computer. You can adjust the live picture and also play back from the card w/o and added degradation by the computer playback system.

Just a couple thoughts. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
 
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Phil1076 said:
Can you post a clip of the digital artifacting?

Regarding the clip being split, please use google or search these forums. This has been covered about a thousand times and happens with ALL tapeless cameras.

Please also read Adobe's whitepapers on AVCHD/Premiere workflow.

Did you import the AVCHD clips properly or did you just drag the .MTS files over?

Your lens is not a good lens for low light. It's a F 4 - 5.8 so....that might be your problem.
Click to expand...


I thought I was reading the recent whitepapers on the avchd workflow. What is the difference between importing vs. dragging the files over?
 
Phil1076 said:
Can you post a clip of the digital artifacting?

Regarding the clip being split, please use google or search these forums. This has been covered about a thousand times and happens with ALL tapeless cameras.

Please also read Adobe's whitepapers on AVCHD/Premiere workflow.

Did you import the AVCHD clips properly or did you just drag the .MTS files over?

Your lens is not a good lens for low light. It's a F 4 - 5.8 so....that might be your problem.
Click to expand...

I can try to post a screen grab of the artifacting later, I'm at work right now (hence why I can't look at the manual, camera, etc. at the moment)
Do you think the likely culprit is the poor light level? Not sure whay that would cause artifacting.

As far as how I get them into my editor, I click on file/import file. I can check more on this if I look at these Adobe whitepapers perhaps. Are thes on the Adobe website? I will research it more when I get home.

Regarding the lens quality for low light, I need to be able to shoot in dimly lit/and night time conditions for some future projects. Other than opening up the iris all the way and using gain (afraid of producing noise though, but I'll expermient) do you have any advice for how to get good quality shoots at night, etc? I also have a Voightlander .95 lens on order which should arrive to me in a few days. I've heard this lens is not bad for shooting low light levels, any thoughts on that? I may be shooting lots of low light stuff down the road that's why I'm asking for advice in advance.

Final note: searching split clips has given me the insight that this is a common occurance and that clips need to be stitched together. Unfortunately the threads I encountered seemed to be talking about the problem with a level of familiarity I don't have. I get that it is a common issue, but I guess I don't understand why. I think I was able to infer it has something to do with a 4GB file size limit that this type of techniology uses. Am I close? If so when can I tell when I'm going to hit that, I suppose it varies a lot on what type of settings I'm using, but is there a menu option or soemthing that will display for me when I'm getting close to that threshold (assuming my inference is even correct) Do things like external recorders (which I also know nothing about) circumvent this problem? Is this what something called a "ninja" recording module or osmething like that can help get around? (sorry I just don't know what these things are/do yet)

Sorry for the questions, but as stated at work so I'm limited to what I can access, and I can't see my manuals or camera at this time.
 
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