Hi,

I'm having a bit of a noise issue with the XF305. Just bought the camera and am very impressed with most parts of it. But the image it pulls, even in bright situations encounters noise. I haven't seen it on other users test footage so is it their compression cutting it out or am I using the wrong settings?

To see what I'm talking about, the following URL is a cropped frame from a shoot a few weeks ago. Although it's cropped, in this screen cap it's 100% size. As you can see, despite being in direct midday sunlight the side of the Spitfire, the grass and the blue sky itself exhibit a level of noise that frankly is too high for me to use the shot.

http://tinyurl.com/nlv2f8t

I was shooting at 1920x1080 P, 50mbps. I had the inbuilt 1/64 ND on, 0db gain and 1/50 speed. I think my f stop was in somewhere between f3-f4. I was shooting with the BBC's recommended custom picture profile settings.

I've noticed the camera is very bad in low light and for some reason switching Special Rec onto Slow & Fast Motion, changing no other settings, and keeping it at 25fps opens up another stop of light. Is this switching it to interlaced recording? How come the image gets brighter?

Thanks in advance for your help.

In the settings you can drop the gain down to -3 and -6. See if those are any better.

Thanks, the drop to -6db is an improvement. Renders the camera pretty useless in even moderately lit situations though.

Hi Brice, i find this a very strange fault indeed. I've used this camera since they were first shipped here, without any of the noise issues you're getting with zero gain
I've used it as a second camera on broadcast drama, and in the edit/grading suite people were remarking how clean the images were compared to the main camera!

How bizarre. Do you think it's a fault in the camera electronics then? How would I troubleshoot?