C100: Rented a C100: Image is rather grainy.... What am i doing wrong?

TimurCivan

TimurCivan

Director of Photography
Staff member
Hey guys, I rented a C100 for a job, figured i'd give it a whirl.

Doing some tests in my hotel room right now, and i have to admit.... The image is not spectacular. Where is the grainless low light monster i keep hearing about? @850 ISO it looks like my Epic @ 3200 ISO.

What am i doing wrong?

I factory reset it, black balanced it, and have it set up in EOS standard mode. I figured a good starting place. Not happy.

C100 owners: whats a good setup? I'm sure there is some setting somewhere im missing, or not turning on.

Camera is set correctly with WB, and i have cinegamma on.

video coming in a few seconds...
 
TimurCivan said:
Hey guys, I rented a C100 for a job, figured i'd give it a whirl.

Doing some tests in my hotel room right now, and i have to admit.... The image is not spectacular. Where is the grainless low light monster i keep hearing about? @850 ISO it looks like my Epic @ 3200 ISO.

What am i doing wrong?

I factory reset it, black balanced it, and have it set up in EOS standard mode. I figured a good starting place. Not happy.

C100 owners: whats a good setup? I'm sure there is some setting somewhere im missing, or not turning on.

Camera is set correctly with WB, and i have cinegamma on.

video coming in a few seconds...
Click to expand...

Do you have the ND engaged? (sorry, just getting that one out of the way)
 
hmm....apparently when shooting 30P, it only records interlace..... On a static frame the interlace on a computer looks like noise.

Converted the file to Prores and its much better. But still not even close to my old F3 @ 800 or even my Epic for that matter....

puzzling....
 

:/ Kinda not happy man....

This is cine mode and needs a grade, but still.... This is 640ISO. it should be whistle clean....
 
i'd offer to take a look, but from your hotel comment, i'm guessing you're not in NYC at the moment

you mentioned you're using eos standard, but with cinegamma? have you tried wide DR?

it seems a good number of people have seem c100 footage as noisy, but it's never been nailed down if it's hardware or user to blame. usually it's user looking at the screen too closely. in the case of the C cameras, yes there's noise, but it's a far more film grain like noise that isn't in any way ugly like typical dslr noise.

give wide DR a go, and try out 24P, see if that makes any diff.

this is the only thing i've shot on eos standard

 
thank you man.

i have to shoot in 30p for this project. no choice.

in 24p it looks better.
 
I too cannot over emphasize the importance of a good black balance at EVERY ISO change. Just got through shooting 4000 ISO this evening, and it really could not be much cleaner given such a high ISO. Frankly, I am in love with this strange looking camera. The internal AVCHD is not bad, but I'm running everything to the ninja, and just love how that grades, and in fact if there is any noise the ninja footage with neat video cleans up astonishingly well. Also, I know it's not everyone's piece of cake, but I think the best bet with this camera is to shoot at 850 ISO when possible and shoot to cinema log. Very very clean.
 
By the way, the ninja footage at 30P is also tagged as interlaced. In Final Cut Pro 7 just re-tag it as "none" for fields and you're good to go. Couldn't be more progressive.
 
TimurCivan said:

:/ Kinda not happy man....

This is cine mode and needs a grade, but still.... This is 640ISO. it should be whistle clean....
Click to expand...

Is this cine mode locked? Sorry mate have only dabbled with a C100, but I can say steer away from EOS standard.
 
Am surprised to hear though I don't use C100. I use C300 in some pretty demanding ISO situations.

Black balance after ISO changes and correct exposure will result in clean images. It works well in low light, but don't underexpose. Crush the blacks later in post if you want. At what IRE are you exposing? Did you try the c-log?
 
Alan Roberts made this test - http://thebrownings.name/WHP034/pdf/WHP034-ADD70_Canon_EOS_C300.pdf

at page 15 you can read: Video noise reduction is available in this camera. There is a noise advantage of about 1.5dB to be gained from setting it to Automatic mode, and this has little or no visible effect on resolution.
However, it should be borne in mind that this advantage is when the camera is set to +12dB gain,and that the advantage should be rather less at 0dB gain. Nevertheless, the noise reduction is worthhaving, and it is only with noise reduction that the specified noise level of -54dB is reached.

Canon wrote that signal to noise ratio of the C300 is 54dB. Alan Roberts wrote that it is true when ISO320 and NoiseReduction4 are aplied.

But in real life I have no problem with noise on my C100 at 50i (25p is different but not too much) to ISO4000 (normal and cine1 gamma), to ISO1250-2000 (WDR gamma), to ISO4000 (canon-log). If I need realy clean image then I use ISO320, cine1 or c-log gamma (not WDR) and NoiseReduction2 (or3), sharpness -3 and coring +8 or+10. The result is a very clean image (noise is the most visible in black parts, see Alan Roberts "figure 9" - noise distribution; between black and middle gray is change about 3.5dB level of noise).


Im a very happy with lowlight from C100, with glass F1.5 it is amazing tool at its price level.
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TimurCivan said:
[video=vimeo;73350398]
This is cine mode and needs a grade, but still.... This is 640ISO. it should be whistle clean....
Click to expand...

Why is that image deinterlaced? Horrible aliasing on the bottle. Deinterlacing takes away about 50% of your resolution, it will also increase noise because the specks became 50% bigger. Please, get a working NLE and check your settings. Just tagging interlacing back to "none" doesn't work in that horrible piece of software called FCP7. You also have to reimport them into the sequence and make sure the sequence is also none.
 
it's also worth noting now much cleaner it is when properly exposed.

i don't BB very often as im already satisfied with the image, though should get into the habit.

 
FFoxX said:
In my experience, C-Log AVCHD footage has more compression artifacts (especialy blocking on flat midtones containing subtle noise) that the same scenes shot using Wide DR gamma.
Click to expand...
sebben said:
I concur with ffoxx, I have created a wide DR profile that basically looks just like C-log, just to get better noise performance in the mids. Significantly less macro blocks flying around. I do not like the colous of the standard Wide DR profile.
Click to expand...
from thread: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...CP-for-flat-light&p=1986356705#post1986356705
Getting crowded in here, and I have too little experience with this camera. I'll leave it here. Hope all goes well.
 
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