Shooting 720p HD producing Bad Results?

[Pete Burger]

I have a Canon cam myself, so I can just guess…
The Canon cameras save a thumbnail file for each clip, that contains all of the meta-data (EXIF) of the clip and can be read with an exif-viewer. Don’t know, if the Nikon does something similar. Watched your Youtube-clip and it is indeed grainy. I’m not sure if it’s the Youtube compression, but I would suggest there is something wrong with your ISO settings. Are you sure you were shooting manual with low ISO?

[Ravi Kanda]

Yeh I always shoot manual. My ISO setting was 200.

The video appears like this even before I upload it to youtube.

I don’t get this.

[Mark Petereit]

Wow, you’re getting that shallow DOF at 5.4? The footage you posted looks more like it was shot wide open in low light, which would account for the noise.

[Ravi Kanda]

Yeh thats f/5.4.

The lighting was ok. It wasn’t really low.

Is this common to get this much grain?

[Pete Burger]

Is there a way to change compression settings with your Nikon? Everything that is in focus seems to be ok, but all the parts that are out of focus, have a lot of chroma noise and are very blocky… So to me it looks like heavy compression artifacts…
Did you switch all image enhancing methods to off (supposing there are any – the canons have “auto lightnig optimizer” and “highlight tone priority”, which sometimes create weird artifacts)?

[Ravi Kanda]

The only thing I have on auto is White Balance.

[Mark Petereit]

“The only thing I have on auto is White Balance.”

Turn that off. Get a white card (and perhaps a set of warm cards), set your white balance before you shoot then leave it alone. I doubt that that’s what’s causing your issues, but it’s just generally good practice.