what do you advise for best fireworks footage?

What camera are you using?

Joseph

sony v1u - - - - - -- -

Keep the gain on manual and keep it low or even no gain at all.

If you are only shooting the aerial fireworks and don't need the ground footage, the fireworks are actually fairly bright so you won't need gain anyway. If you want to get a look of reality, just shoot at shutter 1/60. You could also go to progressive mode and shoot with a longer shutter (1/30 or 1/24) if you want to have a motion blur effect.

If you want to shoot some of the activities on the ground, you need to add some gain so turn on Black Compensation and set it to Compress so the blacks will stay black. The one thing that really looks annoying in night time footage is noisy blacks.