How to – Shoot in low light and reduce noise on Cannon 550D

[Matias Rispau]

I´m going to give you the trick that I´m using.

I´m shooting a movie with my 7d(550d it´s almost the same in electronics) this days and it consist in a “all night, low light shooting”. The true to make your footage usable in post is to get the perfect exposure of your shot, do not under expose “NEVER” because of the limitation of the h.264 codec. The codec gets a little nasty when you try to bring up all the “under exposed image”, so try to get the perfect exposure, use the camera metering to guide you “DON´T THRUST ON YOUR EYE” whatching the LCD because they are very bright.

I´m shooting in ISO 1250, you may think “That´s a lot of gain” and yes it´s a lot of noise for the big screen BUT… Im geting a perfect exposure and that lets me work a lot with the footage. Also the trick is… “Do Noise Reduction”, I use the “DeNoise” plugin from “Re:vision FX” and it´s… Perfect. The footage looks perfect, the exposure is perfect and the final product looks perfect. The only problem is that Denoising takes time of render but thats an other thing.

Good luck.

[Ali Hassan]

@everyone

I am back and I did everything from the ‘Faithfull’ picture style to the 1/50,f2.0 and I really wana know if you see what I do in my video.
At this point more than technical advice I guess I need another set of eyes to look at my shot and tell me about it coz I think I am being over critical or maybe not! 🙂

Here is what I think, in the shot below when I pan to the greener areas the I can see small amount of noise, at this point I don’t even know what that is to be honest… so I color corrected it to bring out what I am talking about..its not the best looking correction we may have seen I personally hate it but it shows what I am talking about.

Can you spot the noise in this video or you think I need eye surgery!!

https://www.vimeo.com/13128962

[Ali Hassan]

Some say that the so called “noise” that I keep referring to is due to the compression, when I bring it over to my editing software and there isnt any way around it…

If what you guys see is not actual “noise” then I dont think the denoise or the neat video plugins might work or maybe they will.. i duno.

So is there a way around this compression issue or I just have to deal with it?

[Steve Crow]

Hi Ali,

When you say “when I pan to the greener areas” I am not sure what you mean since the whole video has very much of a green tint to it

Maybe if you gave us the timecode on the Vimeo player for the section you are talking about.

[Matt Pennington]

Red Giant makes a good denoisier, part of their Key Correct Pro suite. I ran it on some T2i clips and was happy with the results, but it did take a long time to render, and the default values were way to severe.

Matt

[Ali Hassan]

@Steve:

Hi!!

This will probably give you the best example of what I am talking about, in this video the “noise”from 0:58 – 1:03 when I pan to a green wall in the hallway.

There isn’t much light but that is the problem that I am talking about, you think its just the video compression issue or something I can find a solution to besides lighting up the scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be_TAzoEkVI

PS:I know the shutter setting isnt right, but this was an old video which I had to dig out 🙂

[Ali Hassan]

Also if u can notice the rolling shutter issue, and if that can be avoided…

[Ali Hassan]

@everyone

Another one with the rolling shutter issue @1/50

https://www.vimeo.com/13185990

Members

[Steve Crow]

That’s the “jelly camera” effect and is caused by you moving the camera too fast, a “whip pan” – keep your pans slow and steady and you won’t have this issue.

[Ali Hassan]

@Steve

This is the result of all the suggestions 🙂

https://www.vimeo.com/13245249