The color is "noise"

[Chamber005]

I'm shooting black and white right now so this discussion can pretty much stay in that parameter unless someone wants to expand on it (though I think this could very well apply to color video as well).

The camera I'm using has a smallish sensor so I'm having to flood it with lots of light. But because we're working in black and white I like to use the blacks and darks as much as I can for framing.

So my question is about noise in the blacks. They're obviously not black because I can, ya know, see it; so my feeling is that they must be grey, white or something inbetween.

Being that I'm flooding the camera with light, I've got plenty of room to back off and bring down the brightness of the image in the correction stage. My question is that instead of just bringing down the image, if I used an old trick they developed for Batman the Animated Series (where they drew the entire cartoon on black paper) and superimposed the black and white image set at a lower transparency atop a flat black layer, would that effectively decrease the "noise" within the blacks?

I always think of noise as being the edges of the pixels not the pixels themselves -- like it's a kind of feathering where the pixels' edges break, the stuff inbetween. If it is indeed just a feathering at the edges of the pixels and not the inner workings of the pixels themselves, wouldn't making transparent an already "feathered" aspect of the image nearly erase that feathering, replacing it instead with, in this case, absolute black?

I'm going to test the theory as soon as I have a machine capable of handling the 24mbps data, but I was wondering if there's any logic in this.

 

[Noiz2]

I would go B&W in post rather than in the camera. Two reasons. First cameras usually go B&W by tossing the color info so you loosing resolution that you don't need to. And second B&W generally isn't a true "black". Different film stocks have different colored blacks, more true with printing to paper but still true with film. So you can get a better "truer" black by doing it in post. Now if this is strictly a B&W camera it's either very old or a surveillance camera and in either case you probably have a very noisy signal by todays standards. And again your fix is probably in post since there isn't probably anything you can do to perk up the signal. Also if it's an old camera or out puting an analog NTSC signal then it's blacks are only going to go down to 7.5 IRE and not the digital standard of 0 IRE so you won't be getting a "true black" from the camera. You can shoot brighter and push the blacks down in post and also desaturate to remove random color noise that you almost certainly will have picked up with the camera.

 

[Chamber005]

I would go B&W in post rather than in the camera. Two reasons. First cameras usually go B&W by tossing the color info so you loosing resolution that you don't need to. And second B&W generally isn't a true "black". Different film stocks have different colored blacks, more true with printing to paper but still true with film. So you can get a better "truer" black by doing it in post. Now if this is strictly a B&W camera it's either very old or a surveillance camera and in either case you probably have a very noisy signal by todays standards. And again your fix is probably in post since there isn't probably anything you can do to perk up the signal. Also if it's an old camera or out puting an analog NTSC signal then it's blacks are only going to go down to 7.5 IRE and not the digital standard of 0 IRE so you won't be getting a "true black" from the camera. You can shoot brighter and push the blacks down in post and also desaturate to remove random color noise that you almost certainly will have picked up with the camera.

Absofruitly I'm shooting in color. I should have specified that I'm shooting FOR black and white. I personally like HD black and white when it has just the slightest hint of brown in it, so color is a must. The color layers on set, lighting, etc, though is all set up for a black and white final image.

Did you have any theory, though, on the whole turning the image partially transparent to bring in a solid black background? Is there any logic in it?