60d noise / softness – any ideas?

[Kyle McConaghy]

Hello, everyone! Thanks in advance for your help. I took my 60d outside for the first time yesterday, and I came away very disappointed. I assume it is user error, but I got incredibly soft and noisy images.

I used the kit lens and had the ISO at 100 or 160. For the daytime shots i used Hoya filters, but for the night shot, there was no filter. Any idea why this footage is so soft/noisy/ugly?

Thanks so much!

60D ugliness on Vimeo

[Chris Barcellos]

Uh, first what are you expecting with 4x. and apparently a moving camera. These are video frames.

Second, what were picture style settings ? What lens was used ? What Fstop. What shutter speed ? Because of shallow wepth of field and out of focus shots are another common issue with DSLR. Many of us shoot softer less harsh images in the camera, and add sharpness in post, while avoiding additional noise. All of these have something to do with the image quality.

Third, the extra ND glass in front of the lens can soften the image. Obviously, the ND also reduces the effective depth of field.

Fourth, noise also occurs with moire and aliasing. In architecture, this often rears its ugly head. T

These are all questions that have something to do with your concerns about video image.

Assuming satisfactory settings there, you have to also be aware that the video image you get will not hold up a gains a still image of the same scene. The resolution is simply not there. The camera,. in order to limit the sized of the video file to conform to AVCHD necessarily has to skip lines and the resolution suffers as compared to a still from the same camera, or a still. You will get a sharper more detailed video image out of many standard video cameras.

Ultimately, if you bought this camera as a an architectural video recording camera, you may not have bought the right camera. While there are plenty of beautiful images coming out of DSLR's you are probably stretching the camera's capabilities if you are expecting finely resolved and tack sharp detail.

[Kyle McConaghy]

Hi, Chris, thanks for your response. Sorry for the lack of information. I used a kit lens and the f-stop was probably around 4-8.

My biggest concern is the noise with a low ISO. I've seen a lot of very clean architectural and landscape images out of DSLR cameras. I just wanted people's input on why there might be so much noise with such a low ISO.

If any one has any ideas, that would be great! Thanks!

[Ted Ramasola]

The image you posted is "normal" dslr imagery. Of course, with the 400% thats expected.

I didnt "see" the noise in the 100%. I only saw the noticeable banding on the 400%.

[Bruce Foreman]

I also didn't see any "noise". You might check your monitor, many of these come "out of the box" with contrast, sharpness, and brightness set near 90% in order to "impress" the buyer with crisp detail rendition.

I had one that showed too much noise in many videos, my other workstation rarely did (I use it with still images and PhotoShop a lot so it is plenty sharp.

When I thought to see what the monitor settings (from the monitor buttons) were I found what I mentioned above. Pulled everything down to midrange, tweaked what I needed, and now both workstations give me the same visuals. Oversharpening often creates noise where there is none, too much contrast enhances any artifacts and makes them look far worse.

I use the 18-55mm "kit" lens a lot (for convenience, I have the 17-40mm f4L but sometimes I don't want to carry that much weight) and it's a fair performer. Put it on a good tripod and slow down on the movement, focus manually using a viewfinder loupe to exclude extraneous light (I've settled on the Hoodman Cine Pro kit for mine (switching from camera to camera I can adjust loupe position over the LCD in under 30 seconds).

Good luck

[Jamie Pippin]

I noticed the noise, Kyle. I deal with the same issue on my 60D.

[Dave Haynie]

One observation on at least some of that: for fairly obscure reasons, a flat, same-colored background, like a blue sky, is a magnet for compression artifacts with most cameras these days: AVC, MPEG-2, JPEG, DSLR, HDSLR, or camcorder. Shoot the same blue sky with the 60D in RAW+JPEG mode, and you'll see that kind of stuff in the JPEG, but not in the RAW.

One of the best improvements with resolution increases is that these things are much harder to see, not that they go away. This was a regular problem in SD digital video... maybe less noticed because most folks didn't have 60" screens, and DV doesn't have the same level of compression. But I got real familiar with this effect shopping for a new HDTV of all things.. in the early days of Blu-ray, and I couldn't find a single disc with good enough encoding that I could actually tell any difference between the three very expensive TVs I was looking at.

As for softness... that may simply be what you see with that lens at 2Mpixel. Camcorders get to cheat a little, particularly the way more common fixed-lens models. The model is built with only, ever, that particular lens, so they pretty much always include sharpening and noise reduction software that's tuned to the specific lens/sensor combination in that model.

I also think that the HSDLRs don't do a great deal of oversampling yet. If the 60D processed the entire 18Mpixel image, then downscaled that using the best downscaling algorithms, it ought to look damn near perfect, at least before compression. But I think they lack the DSP horsepower for that on current generation DSLRs, so they take some shortcuts. And actually, what they ought to do is process the whole sensor using pixel binning at 4Mpixel (eg, each pixel is made from RG/GB sensors), which would eliminate any of the softening you get from Bayer matrix processing. And I'm sure Canon's R&D people know even more about what produces the best images. But the reality is that they're processing the video that the current DSP and memory system can deal with.

[Steve Oakley]

besides what the other posters have said, if you have sharpness down on min, bring it up one mark. to be honest, I've been shooting with my sharpness turned up. at min, you are just making mush. it can cause some aliasing issues to become more apparent, but I've just decided to live with it because making an overall sharper image looks better. I'm not shooting for a movie theater screen, if I was I'd be using an alexa. even if you were shooting with an alexa, you still see the image looking a bit soft at 400%. pixel peeping will only drive you mad, do just get over it, forget it, and go on to make nice looking pix in spite of the fact the camera isn't perfect. I'm over it, no camera is perfect.

[Kyle McConaghy]

Thanks so much for your help, everyone. All of your thoughts were spot on. Taking more footage in places with more color contrast has given me much better results. Really appreciate all of your help!