The best A7s low light setting?

P

Patrik

Member
Hi folks!

Lately I've been messing around with different low light settings on the A7s, but I don't know if I've gotten any wiser?... I'm looking for the most noiseless and good looking setting the A7s can deliver in low light, moonlight for example. I know there are a lot of good cinematographers and technical folks hanging around here, I would love to hear your input on this!

I've so far not been able to find that sweet spot. Some say S-log is stupid to use in these kinds of situations, personally I don't find it that more noisy. Why would S-log be bad in a situation like this? There are literally a million settings you can change within each profile, what would work best in theory?

I'll be testing as much as I can before my upcoming project, any help and input from you guys would be much appreciated!

Cheers
Pat
 
I´m trying to figure out the same with the A7, one question I am asking myself but have not got around to testing yet is what is the highest ISO I can record video with in very low light and still get a clean file?
 
A7 and A7s is a really big difference obviously. Slog2 is not considered good in low light since its strength is extra highlight detail, something you dont need in low light and it is noisy if you dont overexpose. I read somewhere that Cine4 is supposed to be good in lowlight, since its gamma curve has more shadow detail than other styles. Might be wrong though
 
Patrik said:
noiseless and good looking setting the A7s can deliver in low light, moonlight for example.
Click to expand...

Something like Neat Video is almost required in these situations. I have a scene to shoot in a graveyard at night coming up. I plan to use s-log and I might underexpose it if I can. (that is, expose it about normal instead of 2 stops over). There's noise but it's buried in the dark or I can clean it up. I'm not sure about color temp setting though. I read somewhere moonlight is 4100K.
 
Honestly, in my a7s experience, it doesnt really matter a whole lot what profile you use. No profile has more or less noise, but it's certainly more apparent in slog2 because we see so much more into the shadows. I've used a few styles and ultimately none of them are amazing, however with the more crunchy styles, you just end up exposing up a little more than if you were eyeballing slog2, which results in a better picture. I'd still over-expose your slog2 footage by at least a stop, after all, the noise ins't so much in the iso, but in the dark areas of your frame... so pump as much light into it with iso as you can, and you'll get a better image to then grade/denoise in post.

just my .02
 
There's an article on my blog about this with some sample night scenes (exposure and noise workflow).

SLog2 at 3200 is about the same as ISO 800 when the end exposure is matched. Depending on the dynamic range of your scene i would still expose 2 stops over and bring that down in post, you will see better shadows and that's probably where most of your image will be. So in other words it's better to shoot at iso 25000 and bring it down two stops (if you're able to shoot UHD even better, denoise at that res and downsample).

But test test test, because it's up to your eye

cheers
Paul
 
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