Surprising low light finding?

[Larry Chapman]

I'd like some others with DVX200s to experiment with this and report back.

Last night I was in a video related seminar with a very dimly lit presenter. I shot some of it with my DVX200 (1.40). Just because I could, I set the camera to High Sens with 12db gain. I was shooting FHD 59.94 50megabit with the lens wide open and zoomed in full. Here's the surprise.....it looked surprisingly *good*! I expected very objectionable noise, and it was not so. I'm wondering if the noise reduction added with High Sens mode was the saving grace. I used Barry's Scene6 that I modified by raising Pedestal to -4 and Black Gamma to 0.

 

[Mark Watson]

Maybe a combination of increased gain and slow shutter speed. I don't have the camera but I bet the shutter speed dropped down to 1/8 or even 1/4. For low motion scenes it can work but will smear if you pan the camera or the presenter moves too fast.

Mark

 

[Larry Chapman]

Maybe a combination of increased gain and slow shutter speed. I don't have the camera but I bet the shutter speed dropped down to 1/8 or even 1/4. For low motion scenes it can work but will smear if you pan the camera or the presenter moves too fast.

Mark

Shutter speed was locked at 1/60th.

 

[Barry_Green]

High Sens doesn't change the shutter speed; you can lock it (as Larry said).

High Sens definitely helps. Also, having shot in HD helps; the internal processing mixes pixels together which averages the noise down, meaning that you get less visible noise in FHD than you would in UHD at the same gain level.

I've found the DVX200 can be remarkably clean, up to 2000 ISO I think it looks quite good. At 12dB, you'd have been at 2000 ISO. I find 4000 ISO usable, I think 8000 is too grainy for normal use but acceptable when necessary, but the range from 500 to 2000 is really very clean, IMO.

 

[Stevee]

Please forgive me if this has already been asked - I've trawled through as many threads as possible and could not see this:

Has anyone worked on a LUT or Scene file that is optimised for night time usage?

I went out last night to get familiar with the night time performance - I have a GH4 with metabones speedbooster and sigma 1.8 - and I find the performance acceptable: I want my night time shots to look like night time.

Initially I thought I had left the ND on when I switched on the DVX, but I was surprised by 2 things:
How well the footage graded when I got it into Premiere
How effective the High Sens mode is
Changing to a 1/25 shutter speed helped massively too, and if I was shooting an interview with little movement I would use this.

I didn't use the gain at all (apart from the High Sens).

I did notice switching through the scene files made differences too - I'm using Barrys GH4 matched profiles, and V-LOG looked better even in 8 bit than I assumed it would.

When I've got time I will have a trawl through the adjustments myself, but I am aware of the minefield this potentially is, so if anyone more knowledgeable out there has developed anything I would be very interested to hear.