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How to – Shoot in low light and reduce noise on Cannon 550D
Hello,
I recently purchased a Cannon 550D and with that a 50mm 1.4 USM lens for my short film that I would be filming because I was on a budget and this was one of the better Video Dslr’s out der!
Anyways the video quality in meduim to good lighthing is amazing but when it comes down to low-light I see a lot of noise in the final product so wanted some help.
In low-light I make sure I dont go over ISO 400, well I could do IS0 200 but then the video image gets dark because of the lack of good light so ISO 400 is what I do and the Apperture is at 1.4 with the shutter speed at 1/30.
Can I do anything different to reduce the noise factor with my video DSLR?
-A
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33 Replies
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I’m using a 7D and have found I can use up to iso 1600 and get acceptable results, however the largest cause for digital noise, apart from insane levels of iso, is incorrect exposure.
Take your time with the scenes and meter them accurately, if you do not have access to a light meter, try different metering modes on your camera, such as, Evaluative or Center weighted.
Look for problems areas in the scene from an exposure point of view, maybe try to dial in some exposure compensation. Other than that it will be a software solution for noise, or more lights.
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And IMHO the best software out there (if needed) is Neatvideo.
Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts
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The shutter speed should be set a 2 times your frame rate so if you are shooting at 24 frames per second then your shutter should be a 50 (1/50th) and if you are shooting at 30 frames per second your shutter speed should be at 1/60th or thereabouts.
You probably lowered the shutter speed to get more light into the camera but that can lead to jittery footage. When I film I consider my shutter speed as “locked” meaning I can only change the aperture and ISO to get a good exposure.
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You are absolutely correct, I shot at 24fps and I set the shutter to 1/30 to get more light into the shoot and the way u explain it that causes noise I reckon.
I will re-shoot the sequence with 1/50 as the shutter speed and see what happens, you know the funny thing is that all these low light videos shot by 550D look amazing on youtube when posted by other people but when u actually get down to doing it yourself it doesn’t quite come out the way you want it to.. :-sigh !
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@Everyone:
I think at the end of the i might end up buying the neat-video plug-in to reduce the noise factor coz even at 24fps 1/50 shutter speed and f1.4 I see some noise.
Do u guys think i need a more power-full lens than than the 50mm 1.4 that i am using to get the best low light performance?
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Hi Ali
Just to be clear I don’t think the shutter speed issue is related to the noise problems you are having…that’s probably an ISO in combination with F-stop issue.I’m just thinking off the top of my head here but I wonder if this may also have to do with your editing workflow.
If you film at full 1080p in the camera but then upload the video to YouTube at a much lower resolution/quality setting then it would tend to “soften” the video and hide things like noise.
So when you are looking other other videos on YouTube or Vimeo see if you can determine what resolution/quality settings/format is being displayed and what resolution they originally shot the video in.
For instance, when you look at the YouTube player you can see in the gray control bar area just below the video you can often change the quality of the video you are seeing from standard definition all the way up to HD (720p)
So if are watching a video at low resolution on YouTube (like 360p) it may not be that the video is any less noisy than yours it’s that the noise is being “blurred out” you might say because of the low playback resolution.
I hope that makes some sense to you. (and again I can’t say for sure what’s going on with your video but these ideas occurred to me and I am sure others will chime in here with ideas too)
Steve
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No 1.4 is a very fast nice lens…there are 1.2 50mm but you would have so much difficulty getting focus with that lens that I couldn’t recommend it.
What’s the overall lighting like in your scene? Are you filming in a basement with all the lights turned off or are you outside in the sunshine?
I wouldn’t recommend a plugin to solve this problem for you…there’s something else much more fundamental going on. Why not post a link to the video so that we all can see exactly what it is you are talking about, it’s hard to provide feedback without something concrete to view.
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Another way to check exposure is to take a quick still frame and then review it using the Histogram function.
Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/ -
Ali, your lens is stellar, I’m suggesting checking the exposure, another poster suggested taking a still and checking the histogram, which is great advice.
At the end of the day iso 800 should be good, your lens is good, go and buy some cheap LED or uplighters to give you a better chance at a quality image.
Check out the LED lights at https://shop.ebay.com/easysupply/m.html?_nkw=126+led&_sacat=0&_trksid=p3911.m270.l1313&_odkw=&_osacat=0&bkBtn=
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You can use ISO’s well above 400 and still have great looking video.
Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta
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