Tips to lessen NOISE in dark scene.

Huy Vu said:
By adding as much light to the shadow area as the mids and high. This is why this is harder to execute then done. Your need to bring in some bigger fixture overall so that the brightness level in the entire scene go up and then you can preserve your contrast ratio.
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But you can only do it if you have some headroom on top of your range. This was my assumption.
 
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David Jimerson said:
By making everything brighter to the same degree. The backlighting in that silhouette shot is still pretty dim. There's lots of room.

I will backpedal a little bit, though -- there are times when you do need to reduce the contrast ratio if you want detail in both the brights and darks -- of course.
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OK - this alters the case. If you can add some light without clipping - do it! ;)
 
As I said, there's plenty of room here.

Also, I wouldn't look at Dante Spinotti tweaking his image and then take that to mean the pros rely on their camera settings to create their image in lieu of sound cinematographic technique. He could undoubtedly make a good image using a pinhole camera. He's got the fundamentals down; he can use the tools at his disposal to tweak. But I'm pretty sure the camera settings are not where he starts, but what he ices the cake with. (Of course, I don't claim be inside his head.)
 
David Jimerson said:
Also, I wouldn't look at Dante Spinotti tweaking his image and then take that to mean the pros rely on their camera settings to create their image in lieu of sound cinematographic technique. He could undoubtedly make a good image using a pinhole camera. He's got the fundamentals down; he can use the tools at his disposal to tweak. But I'm pretty sure the camera settings are not where he starts, but what he ices the cake with. (Of course, I don't claim be inside his head.)
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I'm sure he knew what he was doing. And knew the equipment pretty well - he shot a lot of movies with Sonys, F23 being his (or Michael Mann's) favorite. He probably could afford to tweak the image a lot considering low noise and huge dynamic range those cameras have - not something you wanna do with HVX ;)
 
Everything concerning the OPs original question has been summed up very well now.
Light properly, tweak your camera for the best results and you should be fine.
I just want to add that if possible try to control colors and thus contrast on set too.
Lighting a black colored room will be much harder than eg. a dark green one.
Or before compromising in lighting, just painting a wall darker or lighter might save the problem more efficiently...
And only yesterday I finally bought the Neatvideo de-noise plug-in and have to say it almost gives the old HVX a DSP update, every HVX owner will get wet eyes after applying it to "problem footage"...
 
I think is very interesting to read "hacking around with master pedestal, gain, and other foolishness is not required". Other that shooting in proper light (which I understand that should be the 1st priority ), in term of settings and switches, is there any other general best practices when shooting in low light ? For example, using gain in low light amplifies more light but adds more noise ....

Also, what are the best methods for reduing noise in post (I having not alot of experience in post)? Im very impressed with RJS screenshot and I would had like to see the same screenshot without post noise reduction to see the real difference. Im ofter looking at a TV show called "departures" (they are using an HVX200a) and their image look always very good and Im very curious how much post processing has been involved in that (as I cant get that much good looking image with my HPX) ...

Thanks !
 
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