Restrict gain to 9db on Sony Sr11/12
 

Got an Sr11 a couple of days ago and really liking it apart from it gaining up too much in low light, I prefer a darker more natural looking picture with less noise. I've worked out that in twilight mode the gain wont go above 9db.

Good info Tony.

Just for general information, the Canon HF100 seems to also do something like this in Cine mode, based on some other posts; and on an HG10 I used once, it seems to do it in spotlight mode as well.

It would be so much nicer if they just had a "limit gain to x dB" function, but at least you can get something similar with some of the scene modes.

Dave, I may be wrong, but I think the Sony won't alter the colors and 'look' in the Twilight mode like the Canon does in the cine mode. That could be significant to some.

You're right, cine mode does shift the colors, gamma, etc. I'm pretty sure the spotlight mode doesn't shift the colors, however, but it does shift the exposure priority to favor non-blowing-out of highlights, which wouldn't work well for some scenes.

Most of the scene modes do shift something or the other in terms of exposure, aperture, shutter speed, or color, so if limiting the gain is all the Sony does in twilight mode, that would be pretty cool and a good thing to know.

One of the things I like about the SD9 is the full manual exposure control which lets you fix the gain, shutter, and aperture independently, but after playing around with both, I might be leaning toward the HF100 because of the better image quality - better sharpness but poorer colors actually - so many tradeoffs. Too bad there isn't a Canasonic SD100 with the best of both!

on the canons you can also lock the exposure and gain out and see when it kicks in on the hf10 turn on the photo in video mode and pressing the photo button will show you the settings f stop and shutter, the camera shutter will blink when gain is active, you can lock the exposure before the gain kicks in and have a full range of 11 clicks to go up or down in exposure and see when the gain kicks in so you can avoid that setting.

It gives you full control of gain, shutter and iris although its a bit of a work around method.

That's pretty cool. I guess this is the same trick people have been using on their HV20's. Is there any way to see what the gain actually is, or just if there is gain or not? When you lock it, it sounds like it does not vary the gain when you adjust it up and down. Is that the case? I guess if you are already at max aperture and min shutter, you probably don't have any down range.

Thx.

I knew of that trick on my Canon HV20, but frankly it was too much of a pain to bother with. The twilight mode seems like a much easier method of limiting gain, but it sure would be nice if these companies would simply give us a gain adjustment or limiter. On my VX2100, I never allow gain to go beyond 12db.