Shooting in a low light Room
 

Hello People,
I shoot weddings and a few local bands with this HD101 Camera, My question to you is, if i am shooting the reception in a low light room can any one give a bit of help re the settings on the camera. I use the gain set to 3 and the black streach on. The filming of bands are ok bcause of the stage lights, but in a wedding you can't use big lights. I was using the sony HDV and that was a lot better,but i have know moved to the JVC 101.
I also tried the low light setting on this page, found it to be to noisy,

I have tried the settings from Paulo Ciccone's , Stephen Noe's and Tim, still not happy.

The room is setup size is the same as a 10 car garage, with dimmer lights and small table lihgts. and as you all would know this suck big time when tring to film,but that how the brides want it.

rob.

I'm thinking black stretch might make your picture look worse when you're in dim lighting. It might make it look low contrast and washed out. You will probably have to live with some noise but should be able to go to a gain of 6 without too much trouble.

Hi Robert,

Yes if you use the default settings out-of-the-box, it may seem that the JVC is not doing that well in low light. Until you start tweaking in the settings.
For low light environments I use the Low Light settings Tim made. You can download it from the sticky post on this forum.
This way I have better results then the Z1.
And I don't go over 6db gain with this setting.

AE Levels
 

Robert,

I second what Marc stated about the tweaking. This camera is definitely not for people who just want to point and shoot (though you can set it to do this if you want to). Once you spend some time with it you can deal with the low light fairly easy. SSE may be an issue, but I've only seen this once in a church, and only then until the CCD warmed up.

Something that may help is the AE levels. I have mine set up (+/-) on all my scene files to USER1 and USER2. That not only helps with the low light issue, but it also helps to find the lense's ideal shooting stops (prob. between 2.8 and 4 for the stock lens). Hope this helps -JV

If you can edit it 24P (premiere, etc.) you should gain an extra stop of light with the 24p over the 30P. It helped a little for our low light situations with used with Tim's low light settings. Also, 6db gain over the 3db you are using is not bad in regards to noise levels.