Is your AGC in the off popsition ? The factory default (out of the box) is on. at least mine was. For what it's worth my new A1 looks better in low light than my Broadcast D600 betacam. For 4K the A1 rocks.

This is a pic of a SD Sony PD170 at night with various settings.

I am not sure if that was directed at me or not but I have had the AGC off since day one.

What do you mean by better? Brighter? My A1 is definitely brighter than my FX1 bu tI wouldn't say its better.

Obviously its much easier to apply a little color correction to boost the brightness a bit but there is nothing to get rid of noise in post effectively.

No offence but the PD170 looks horrendous, especially the way its dealing with the actual lights.

Pic from Canon A1
http://www.scarlet-films.com/A1/speed.jpg

Would like to see how Sony cams match up at that size, and let me assure you th 1080 image is just as clean, just used preview on my mac to cap this from FCP.

Noel, that looks fantastic,. settings?

Daniel, not meaning to critisize you. I appreciate that people who already have the cam (Mine hasnt shipped yet) are trying to post stuff. I am thankful...

I just think people might be expecting a BIT much from the lowlight... I mean, what is a camera but a device designed to capture light? Even a $500,000 35mm camera with 500 ISO film will NOT be able to shoot in the dead of night... I have never really seen a camera where lower light doesn't equal higher grain... kinda just the real world...

I would. however, try to boost the in camera saturation, turn on noise reduction (medium maybe), turn on any grain reducers you can, check the knee and shoulder, maybe crush the blacks and expand trhe whites, try the cinema settings... Canons are notrorous for their customization...

If anyone has comparison pictures of the A1 and other cameras, with settings specified and either the brightness or amount of grain visually matched, please post them. We're short on complete factual information and long on posturing; DVinfo is all about the former, not the latter. Thanks.

All my settings can be found in this thread click click

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=76945

From my tests, the XHA1 is about a stop to two stops faster than a Sony Z1U.

The XHA1 comes out of the box with sharpness set pretty high and that gives the impression of lots of noise at high gain.

Turn down the sharpness, turn on black stretch, give some noise reduction, and set the gain to 18db and you can shoot in much darker places than a Z1U and get perfectly useable footage. (Be moderate with the noise reduction though -- on high, you'll get weird ghosting on motion.)

The noise that it does have is much like film grain and is not like the clumping noise of the Z1.

Chuck

Chris: it sounds to me as if you were initially shooting with the AGC on (probably with the camera setting the value to 18dB), and when you pushed the gain button, then it went into manual, and you had the preset at 6 dB, so that's why it got darker.

The gain on the FX1 is automatic unless the gain button is pushed, then it goes into manual, if I'm not mistaken.

Man! That picture is nice...real nice...
Is that the PAL version of the A1? ( I know there's some Resolution differences in PAL-Land)

With respect, shooting at a very slow 1/3rd sec which is what i believe you used for the cars-from-bridge shot means you're not going to have to use much (any?) gain!! So really in my book the comparison to another cam when one is shooting at 1/30th & 1/60th and the other is shooting at 1/3rd sec is completely invalid.

The PD170 shots were shot at either 1/30th or 1/60th. Would be good to see a cars-from-bridge screenshot shooting at 1/30th or 1/60th.

daniel, try stepping up the coring a bit, stretch the blacks, and set NR1 to "LOW". anything higher than "LOW" seems to introduce these trippy afterimages. NR2 seems to work better in some cases -- no afterimages -- but details in the picture begin to soften/disappear. with these tweaks, you should be able to get a decent image with barely perceptible noise at +6 to +12 gain. regarding saturation, the a1 has so many image control tools that you should still be able to dial in a few looks that you really like.

I didn't realize that. Seems like that is the case, though. So only way to shut off automatic gain, even though you are in manual settings for iris and shutter speed, is to have the low setting on the manual gain at zero. I'm at my office, and no camera here, but I assume that can be done.

In HD, there is no difference of resolution in PAL or NTSC cameras, and I do believe that he is using an NTSC camera.

on FX1 to be in full manual you have to set the auto/manual/hold swith in the middle position (manual) and then press all four buttons: iris, shutter, gain, and AW. Only that will guarantee you that the FX1 won't do anything on its own accord.