Should footage be this noisey?
 

I've been starting to notice noise in the picture, and not gainey noise, it's showing up at 0db. (please don't tell me to shoot at -3db, it limits superwhites to ~90IRE, and obviously drops exposure)

The attached picture is straight from an EX1 sitting on my desk, 1080/24p shutter off 0db gain, f/1.9. The picture profile is Bills TC2, detail off, with blacks at -2. Do you see all that noise in the shadows, specifically the wall? Should that be there?

Also completely unrelated, I've been having trouble in general getting that ridiculously good looking look out of the camera that people seem to effortlessly get. (Yes, including grading) It's like I have something in the picture profile set horribly wrong.


http://fohdeesha.com/data/pictures/other/noise.png

Can you set up a shot for F4 and post that? Also on your other issue, are you seeing the same problems on the stock profile settings??

No problem, thanks for the response. To get any exposure at all at f4 I had to use a 500 watt halogen, so it's obviously going to be hard to judge the difference with there not really being any shadows or "low light". I'm still seeing that odd noise in certain areas though.

http://fohdeesha.com/data/pictures/other/noisef4.png


As for the standard profile, I'm not sure as I've never really shot with it. I guess I should experiment.

Jon,

I am about as far from an expert as it gets. I was curious about something which is why I wanted to see the F4 image. Out of curiousity, are you shooting with tungsten light? I am wondering if you'd see a difference with 5600k light. Tungsten light is particularly noisy in dark scenes.

I'd be curious to see if you'd see a difference with the standard profiles, and also with 5600k light if you had it available.

Noise doesn't jump out at me as much as the severe "stairstepping" on the power cord for the charger in the lower left corner of the picture.

Could the noise (and stairstepping) be in the frame grab itself?

The picture also looks grossly oversharpened to me.

Huhhh!!?? Are you saying........huh????

I am saying that due to the design of most video cameras, the blue channel tends to be the noisiest, and when using tungsten the relative lack of blue in the light tends to make the problem worse than when using daylight balanced light.

Exactly. Whitebalance technically isn't more than per-channel-gain. And a low whitebalance-temperature means a lot of blue-channel-gain.
Try this:
1. Set detail to off.
2. Use cine1 or cine3 instead of std-gammas (because std-gammas have some "built-in-gain" for leaving headroom for their knee-feature).
(3. don't deinterlace progressive footage ;) )

Thanks Perrone. I learn something new every day here!! ;-)

Beautiful discussion on it here:

Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications Part 7: Single Sensor Cameras Continued

Thanks again, Perrone. I just watched the segment you linked to and now I'm going back to the first segment and watching the whole thing. This should be required viewing for all of us.

detail was off, I was using cine 1, and oops LOL. Was wondering why the bmp output was all jaggedy

heres the f4 properly exported without "deinterlace" checked (oops)


http://fohdeesha.com/data/pictures/o...sef4proper.png

also, why does it look like details on cranked all the way up when it was clearly turned off in the PP menu?

edit: going back into the pp menu, detail was turned on. What in the world? I give up

Thanks Perrone great link.

Jon,

I'm not really seeing a noise problem with this new screen grab or the other one. Where should I be looking?

As far as appearing "sharpened" f/1.9 (the first post's screengrab) vs. f/4 will get you a lot more depth of field and therefore more objects will be in focus in your video. Between f/2.8 and f/8 is the "sweet spot" of video lenses and you're there.