My FS100 is noisy???

J

Jean-Philippe

Well-known member
Hi, a few weeks ago, I shot a big gig, 5 days shooting, involving doing several interviews. I shot with two FS100. When I started to review the footage, I noticed that on some shots, there was a little bit of noise in the shadows. Not a big deal, I went ahead with editing. By the way I don,t remember every settings, but everything was well lit and I'm almost sure everything was shot at 0db (500 ISO). At the time, I used GLog B.

When my edit was done, I started grading, and a few times the noise got very ugly when I had to lift the mids a bit. Again, not a big deal, I corrected the clips with Magic Bullet Denoiser, and the footage I delivered was stunning, the client was more than happy.

But... I told myself, isn't the FS100 supposed to be very noise free in high ISO? Why on earth am I getting noise at 500 ISO???

I started testing, and it was fairly easy to reproduce using GLog. I tried other profiles, and discovered that one of the popular one these days, Kyle McGonaghy's one, exhibited considerably less noise. But still, in high contrast scenes, I still can see some noise.

I have shot a very simple test to show you what I am talking about. Since I was alone, I took one of my daughter's dolls to have some skin tones to judge exposure. In the non-lit area, you can fairly easilly spot the noise.

Do you think it's a normal behavior? To be honnest, I can definitly live with it. When vewed on an HDTV, at normal viewing distance, you definitly can't see any noise. And it's easy to get rid of it with software when needed. But I just want to know if you guys think my camera should be checked up by SONY?

Thanks!
 

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I've been curious about the same thing, Jean-Phillppe. I think it just comes down to any dark, underexposed area is going to show some noise. The profiles using the Cinematone gammas, I believe, show less noise, b/c the blacks are darker. Here is a test I did w/ some different profiles...

 
I've noticed mine to be a bit noisy at times at 500 & 800 iso which is suprising considering people say they see practically no noise at 3200 iso. That being said, it's still pretty damn good and way way less noise than my af-100 I had before.
 
I have found something weird. When I use a 3 way color correction tool (in this case, Colorista II) to lower the highlight in the broadcast safe area (from 110 mar IRE to 100), the noise almost completely vanish!

Look at those frames, they are printscreen of my Premiere CS5.5 window showing the scope and an area of the footage with noise, manified to 150%. without and with color correction applied.

http://www.jparchibald.com/highlight110ire.jpg
http://www.jparchibald.com/highlight100ire.jpg

This is strange since the noise is in the shadow area, not in the highlight.

Can someone with more knowledge in video signal than me explain that to me please?
 
I just tried doing the exact same thing with the fast color correction tool in premiere, with the exact same results in the noise.
 
Jean-Philippe said:
I just tried doing the exact same thing with the fast color correction tool in premiere, with the exact same results in the noise.
Click to expand...

That's what reducing contrast does. If you on the other hand, increase contrast, you would see the noise going up.
 
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