What am I doing wrong?

[Terry Lee]

Hope I still have everyone's attention with this. I have a shoot next Saturday and i'm still worried that my camera is doing something weird...or i'm doing something stupid haha..

Anyhelp is much appreciated

Thank you!!!

[David Barnett]

What do you mean "it looks choppy"? Is it stuttering? If so, it's possible the files are a bit too large for your computer to play live. I have 16gb & sometimes AVCHD files kinda stutter as I play them. I don't know much about DSLR's per se, but a good way to reduce grain is to improve lighting (obvi). Standard household lighting pretty much sucks. Maybe its sufficient for your 60D I'm not sure. Typically it's enough for photographers but keep in mind they shoot using incredibly high powered flashes which give a split second burst of light during the photo capture process. Depending on what kind of shoot it is, would a small on camera light work?

[Terry Lee]

Hello,

The problem, If you've watched the video is that the images are too grainy when captured. When I take them from my camera to my comp, they appear underlit and look to be shot on ISO 1600. However I shot it ok around 600 to 800 with decent light at f2.8 and I still get grain. It's as if the files that the camera is capturing is a very compressed format. I posted statistics in a post above.

[Victor Nguyen]

if you can send me the file through google drive. My email is Victornnguyen12@gmail.com

You still haven't told us what picture style you were using. It looks extremely contrasty. If you haven't done this yet, download magic lantern and put on the histogram. It'll get you 70% there with your exposure.

[David Cordero]

Make sure to heed Garrett's advice about ISO settings on the 60D. That was an eye opener for me. If you need to get to 600 - 800 range ISO for a proper exposure, then use 640 or 800 ISO to get the best from your current lighting set up. (Better lighting should give you sharper images, but maybe that is not an option for you in the apartment.). I've checked your footage, and I don't see what the actual problem is based on my experience using the 60D for video. Using f2.8 at a very close range suggests to me that you are using canon's 40mm pancake lens or something even wider. I don't have experience with that lens, but I do notice that your images are soft at the background and foreground. That is to be expected with a 2.8 setting.

One last thing you can try to do to improve sharpness, is to bump up the sharpness in Premiere. You can try setting it at 20 to 30. It will take more time to render your video, but I dont think there is much you can do with the camera given your lighting environment. There may be manual picture sharpness controls in the 600D (under picture style) but I have not fiddled with that yet to share any meaningful experience.

[Bob Ohlemann]

I've just read through this thread and it sounds to me like you underexposed the video in the camera and found it to be grainy. Yup! Doesn't matter what ISO you're using, if you underexpose the shot it's going to be grainy when you pull it back up. If you want good exposure with minimal noise on a Canon DSLR, you need to be right at the edge of blowing out the highlights.

Your video is also very contrasty. If it came out of the camera that way, you need to go into your menu and fix this. You should have a nice flat picture style. You can google how to set that up or you can install the Technicolor Cinestyle picture style on your camera and use it.

Once you have something usable out of the camera, you can season to your liking in post.

Bob

[Terry Lee]

Hey Victor, The picture style was standard. I haven't decided if I want to put Magic Lantern on my 60D yet or not.. I just foresee it crashing my camera, but that's probably me just being nervous.

What picture style should I shoot under..? Where can I learn about this?

Thanks!

[Casey Danielson]

+1 Technicolor Cinestyle

You don't need Magic Lantern to get a nice flat Gamma profile. If you get the most recent firmware for your camera, follow that by loading one of the Cinestyle profiles onto it. Things will look less eye-popping coming right out of the camera upon playback, but the flatter gamma gives you way more room to play with color-grading after the fact.

If you've got noisy source material, you might try Neat Video - best noise reduction for digital video De-noiser. It doesn't solve the problem, but it can clear things up quite well, especially at that price.

Good luck!

[Evan Bourcier]

Originally Posted by Garrett Low

One thing to remember with Canon DSLR's is that lower ISO does not necessarily mean lower noise. For instance, you'll get more noise using ISO 400 than. There is a very technical explanation that I won't go into (you can easily Google it). The ISO's to use in order from least noise to more noise are:

160,320, 640,100, 200, 400,800, 1250, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 1600

So, if you're shooting at say 250, thinking wow, low ISO so low noise, you'll be disappointed.

This is actually false just fyi..

Canon DSLR's & the wrong 'native ISO' - fcp.co