Should footage be this noisey?

[Jon Sands]

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

[Perrone Ford]

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??

[Jon Sands]

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.

[Perrone Ford]

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.

[Tom Roper]

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.

[Dave Morrison]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

...<snip>...Tungsten light is particularly noisy in dark scenes.
...<snip>

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

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Dave Morrison

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.

[Dominik Seibold]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

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 ;) )

[Dave Morrison]

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

[Perrone Ford]

Beautiful discussion on it here:

Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications Part 7: Single Sensor Cameras Continued

[Dave Morrison]

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.

[Jon Sands]

Originally Posted by Dominik Seibold

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 ;) )

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

[Jon Sands]

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

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks Perrone great link.

[Adam Reuter]

Originally Posted by Jon Sands

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

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.