MX-350 - Low Light
 

Hi Guys,

Here's another low-light question:

In full-auto mode, my MX-350 shows quite a fair bit of video-noise, unless I'm in the brightest of sunlight. Does this happen to everyone else?

In shadows, or especially at night, I get ALOT of noise.

I have played around with manual settings, but can't seem to work out how to get better low light footage.

I am shooting a band playing in a small darkish venue on Friday night. I'd love to know whereabouts I should set my camera to get the best quality footage possible.

Anyone with a similar camera should be able to give me some idea.

Thanks for your help guys.

Mark.

Re: MX-350 - Low Light
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Tim Hammond : Hi Guys,

In full-auto mode, my MX-350 shows quite a fair bit of video-noise, unless I'm in the brightest of sunlight. Does this happen to everyone else?
In shadows, or especially at night, I get ALOT of noise.

I am shooting a band playing in a small darkish venue on Friday night. I'd love to know whereabouts I should set my camera to get the best quality footage possible.

-->>>

Noise is inevitable, in manual setting, turn the sharpness down a few notches and the noise reduces (and correspondingly less sharp images). Do not go more than +12db. +15 and +18 is for the REALLY desperate.

For a performance, I would expect the actual scene to be properly lit. What you can do is to set manual settings such as 1/50 and +9db throughout the performance. I know that the background will be black, but the performers should be lit properly in 'daylight'. do not zoom more than 4x as the iris will also be reduced (most lenses suffer the iris reduction, it is a physical problem, very costly to produce constant aperture lenses) and you'll lose some light. Also, thanks to linking the Neutral density filter (ND) with the iris, after 6x zoom, the ND gets int eh way, which is ridiculous for low light conditions (sigh, Panasonic oh Panasonic).

BTW, why do you sign off Mark when you name is Tim Hammond? :)

:) :) :)I'm sure this happans to every cam owner. However, a cam will large CCDs should have less of a problem, unless there's no light.