Grainy EX1 Footage.

[Ben Cannon]

Hi there,

I've recently shot a short promo. (Cross Shot on 2 X EX1 cameras.)

On watching it back some of the shots are really grainy i'm wondering why this happened and what can be done to fix it?

The format I used was 1280 x 720 25p on one camera 720 25p on the other. (this was actually one thing that suprised me - even thoguh they were both EX1's they didn't have the same format options. On further research i found that these were in fact the same format albeit displayed differently for each camera, does this seem right??)

It was a perfect filming day - bright sunshine, however we were filming in shadows at some points but the light was never low enough to adversly affect the filming conditions.

We white balanced and were careful correctly expose the shots.

If anyone can give an insight as to why this happened and any ways to fix it i would greatly appreciate it.

Many thanks,

Ben.

[Bill Heslip]

Hi Ben and welcome!

I'm not sure I can help you but more information would be helpful. Did both cameras exhibit noise? Under what circumstances? What picture profile were you using (same for each camera?) What were your camera settings, especially iris? ND filter? Could you have inadvertently turned up gain?

[Warren Kawamoto]

Is it possible that you turned up the gain switch by accident?

[Keith Malone]

Originally Posted by Warren Kawamoto

Is it possible that you turned up the gain switch by accident?

As Warren says, a gain setting of anything over 6 in daylight will be noticeably grainier than normal.

[Matt Davis]

The EX1 and EX1R have a certain 'texture' when compared to, say F3 or FS700. To my eyes, it's more grain than noise (having worked with JVC).

If it really is causing problems for you, try the Neat Video plug-in for uncanny noise reduction. It doesn't perform miracles, but it does a nice 'lipstick' job which will help for web compression. For higher bitrate compression, I'm tempted to leave as is, especially if downsampling to SD/DVD.

Neat Video - best noise reduction for digital video

Originally Posted by Ben Cannon

The format I used was 1280 x 720 25p on one camera 720 25p on the other. (this was actually one thing that suprised me - even thoguh they were both EX1's they didn't have the same format options

Are we absolutely sure it wasn't an EX1R and an EX1? I have both, and this is one of the nomenclature differences. If not, and both are EX1Rs, it could be a mismatch in the software. Just a bit of tidying up on the menus, no difference to the format.