Is this amount of EX1 noise normal?

[Craig Seeman]

It’s hard to know what’s “normal” without knowing your Picture Profile or your gain settings. Some PP settings can stretch the blacks and others compress them. Other PP settings may also impact noise.

Your Quicktime Animation file shows a lots of compression artifacts so I’m not sure you’re workflow is valid for verification. Maybe poor scaling.

[Navarro Parker]

That amount of compression is what I get out of my EX1. I’m using nearest neighbor scaling at 400%, so there are no additional artifacts from interpolative scaling. Everything out of my two EX1s has been a compressed, noisy mess. So I’d appreciate any tips or further help anyone could provide.

Here are my PP settings:
CineGamma 1
Black -4
Detail -8
Crispening +20
Frequency +30
Cinema Matrix at +35

These settings are meant to reduce noise according to this post here: https://www.xdcam-user.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=338&sid=523f2986b8956842158e0c5a514ea367

[Michael Slowe]

I follow exactly what Doug Jensen suggests in his Vortex Media DVD on the EX 1 and the pictures are perfect.

Sorry can’t remember all the details but if you can’t find them I can look at the DVD or my camera sometime.

Michael Slowe

[Navarro Parker]

I would really appreciate any settings help you could provide.

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Navarro,
The PP is from Alister Chapman I’m using it since a couple of months and I think is really good.
However is intended for shooting in exterior with bright light. Not sure is that is the kind of PP for Chroma Key. I don’t think that Cine Gamma will be much appropriated.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Michael Slowe]

Navarro, for what it’s worth these are the settings I use following Doug Jensen’s video. This is for daylight with a Kelvin setting of 5600. I’m not talking about chromo work or anything very clever, just normal HD video. Film making is hard enough without complicating things – it’s what you are doing with your images that matters. I would stress that there are very many on this forum (most) who are far better than I on technical matters.

The changes I made to the factory settings are:

Matrix: High Sat
Gamma: Cine 4
Black:-3
Black Gamma:-2

and where possible I have the gain at -3 in common with most people. I have noticed however that there seems to be no obvious increase in ‘noise’ if I have to increase the gain even up to +9. I don’t understand why you are getting noise providing you are manually setting gain, shutter and aperture, these cameras are giving us brilliant images.

Michael Slowe

[Michael Slowe]

Sorry Navarro, I also should have said that under the Matrix setting I also have the level set at +3 in addition to having High Sat on. I just looked at Doug Jensen’s Vortex Media EX workshop to check his suggested Picture Profile.

Michael Slowe

[Paul Crowe]

Does anybody have a good pp or tips regarding settings for Handheld fly on the wall styled night shooting? Think COPS style reality TV with EX3/1s.

Will have an on-board light and a few lights to pop up when possible but apart from that I’ll be using (un) available light.

Cheers
Paul

[Navarro Parker]

Thanks everyone! I’ll try these settings and post my results.

[Navarro Parker]

Hey Michael.

I followed your settings and here’s what I got. I hate to say it, but it looks actually worse. I connected my EX1 via SDI to a Decklink SDI, so this is purely what my camera is giving me (and not added XDCAM EX compression)

https://vimeo.com/8605147

Seriously, is this what other EX1 users get? Am I more sensitive to noise? What’s going on?