Making a dark place light..
 

Well I turn up the gain, but it just adds to the noise... =\ Any suggestions, please?

Personally, I hate gain noise so much, I never use it, but there are other ways to get more light into the XL2. Open the iris up. Turn off Neutral Density filters.

Add light! Other than that, gain is your only option, short of getting a large CCD ENG type camera.

Mike

Several things... when you gain up, also turn up the coring, it will mask the noise. You may also need to boost the color saturation a little as low light can be very muted. Next thing, stretch the blacks. After that, try upping the setup level and lastly you can up the master pedestal. The XL2 can pull a lot of detail out of shadows but it can result in pretty noisy, milky images if you are not careful.



ash =o)

Ash, would you please explain two of the terms you used? What is coring, and what is black stretch - I can't find any info on these two.

Ervin,

Before you ask anymore questions, go to this site and downloaad and watch the XL2 Features Tour. It will answer many of your questions and is a must for any Canon user. It is about a half hour long and is one of the best instructional videos I've ever seen. Download it, save it and watch it many many times!

http://www.dvcreators.net/canon-xl2/

Mike

Yeah, absolutely. That video is amazing. About halfway through, some time after the lens bit is over you'll get all sorts of info on lighting, some of it on how to get good lighting in a dark place without overdoing the grain. The rest is really good too.

It says that the destination of the .mov file does not exist. Does anyone know where I could download it?

Coring is a fine detail setting, originally intended to cover small tight patterns but has grown into a noise adjustment. Turning it UP will cut down on fine detail, which will reduce noise. Some higher end cameras allow you to do it for every color. Black stretch is in the menu, default for BLACK is middle, stretch brings out detail in shadowy areas...



ash =o)

See Nic's post in this link (towards the bottom).

Jonathan

Not Found

The requested URL /canon/DemoMovie/XL2_demo_tour.mov was not found on this server.

Yeah, I know. It took me about 15 tries over a couple days to finally get it to work. Don't know why...Nic hasn't responded to any of my posts or e-mails. What browser are you using? (Though I don't think that has anything to do with it.)

Jonathan