Recommended low light settings for A1U

[Michael Y Wong]

^^

Unfortunately Jason footage quality varies from situation to situation so from my personal experience there is never a one stop filter that fixes everything.

Magic bullet editors is my main tool to clean-up/hide grain, low light problems. I play around from filter to filter & of course I also adjust brightness/contrast manually if necessary.

Hope this helps.

[Jason Donaldson]

I guess I'll have to play around, once I get footage that needs "cleaning" as it were.

Thanks guys

[Darren Cole]

Totally agree with Martin L. use manual Focus it makes for a lot better footage instead of getting made when the cam cant focus on anything!

Originally Posted by Martin Labelle

most of the work I do is concert, from big stage to small clubs.
I usually work at 1/30 and sometime 1/15 if I have to.camera lights,is forbiden in the shows I do, but I prefer going with slow shutter speed even if there could be blur than going for the gain wich is horrible blue snow.

...there's a Gain option on the A1?? Where?!

Also, does anybody recommend the HVL-20DW2 light? 'Cause I do a lot of filming in dark places as well and it would be useful to have a light, but my main worry is that the bulb might go quickly... I did see this on Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...MEWA:IT&ih=015

What do you think? Cheap I know, but it's LED lights... says it's 40 lumens though, is that poor?

[Mikko Lopponen]

Originally Posted by Jonny Brady

...there's a Gain option on the A1?? Where?!

The exposure lever controls gain and iris. When you drop the exposure, first the gain goes down and then the iris starts closing.

6 stops from the right equals 0 gain and each stop to the right increases gain by +3db.

Originally Posted by Mikko Lopponen

The exposure lever controls gain and iris. When you drop the exposure, first the gain goes down and then the iris starts closing.

6 stops from the right equals 0 gain and each stop to the right increases gain by +3db.

oh? so that's not a setting that needs to be switched on or anything? it's just always like that?

[Michael Jouravlev]

Originally Posted by Victor Wilcox

I can't find the original posting, but the chart below was posted on this forum for the HC-1:

Exposure Aperture Gain
1 Closed 0dB
2 8 0dB
3 6.8 0dB
4 5.6 0dB
5 4.8 0dB
6 4 0dB
7 4 0dB
8 4 0dB
9 4 0dB
10 4 0dB
11 4 0dB
12 4 0dB
13 4 0dB
14 3.4 0dB
15 2.8 0dB
16 2.4 0dB
17 2 0dB
18 1.8 0dB
19 1.8 3dB
20 1.8 6dB
21 1.8 9dB
22 1.8 12dB
23 1.8 15dB
24 1.8 18dB

Exposure = gain setting steps from left to right.

How does this work, considering that the lens has variable maximum aperture depending whether it is zoomed in or out? Assuming that this table is sort of fixed (as opposed to relative exposure baseline in Canon camcorders), it must be correct for the wide lens only, when it can achieve f/1.8

When the lens is zoomed it, max aperture is f/2.1, this table does not have this value. It is possible that this table is fixed in [1, 16] range, but is variable in [17, 24] range. Depending on current zoom it would use aperture in [f/1.8, f/2.1] range.

Do I understand this right?