My V1 is producing noisey shots, is this normal?
 

Just shot a short film with the V1E in 25P HDV (shutter speed at 25) and had a professional DP light the shots and now we are reviewing them and the DP has comented on the amount of noise on the skin and even highlights. We used no gain and our F-Stop was usually around 2.8 The DP has shot on many HD formats and stated he has never seen that amoutn of noise before.

Need to know if this amount of noise is normal for the V1? I have uploaded a smaple take from the shoot (in QuickTime 7 format though looks like you may need to play it back on a mac with FCP 6 to see it) to my web site:

www.personalmovies.co.uk/Sony_HVR-V1E_Test.mov

Thanks

Kevin

out of focus?
 

Hi,
I can see some noise there, not too much though. On the other hand, the subjects are slightly out of focus (notice that the red tie on the man speaking, is far more focused than his face!) the focus should be a couple of inches closer to the camera. I believe that that's what's wrong about this picture, and my be disturbing you.
what do you think?

Yea it is a bit out of focus (problem with not having a proper monitor when shooting) but I have 2 hours of shots with this noise in it. If that is the norm for this camera, fine then I'll be selling it and buying something better. Just wanted to be sure that what I am getting is what is expected.

I did note today that my DP had set the Kneepoint to High and the Cinemagama to Type 1 and Cnemacolor to On, if that may have added to the noise.

Well, it's hard to tell if your camera is somehow faulty, judging by this clip only. Noise is always more noticeable in the darker areas of a picture, and this particular scene has a lot of that.
To be frank, I don't think that this amount of noise is so bad, but maybe it's just me and I'm already used to it on my V1 too. Also, coming from a JVC HD100, I can assure this picture is definitely cleaner.

But, to answer your question, maybe this really is what you should expect from this camera. Anyway, before getting rid of it, I guess you should do some more tests, maybe with different gamma/colour settings.

much cleaner than my HD100 as well. in fact i'd say it looks good. One thing to do to minimize noise is to check and double check your focus, and to try to keep the aperture at its sweet spot, by either increasing or decreasing light in the scene. i think that despite the shortcomings of the V1 that its a fairly underrated camera. when things work right its images are beautiful!

Watch it on a TV set. LCD monitors make videos appear more noisy than they are, in my experience. mine does.

I noticed the same thing. I imported the clip into Final Cut Pro, let the program scale it down to SD, and output to my Sony Broadcast Monitor via AJA Io. It looked great. Played in in HD on my Apple Cinema Display it looked noisier.

Thanks for all the great feedback, most helpful. I too am looking at it on a Apple 23" CinemaDisplay and have also found when scaled down to SD it looks fine but this is a HD film, so the issue still stands. Spoke to Sony UK and showed them the clip and they state this is normal for the camera. But I want to get to the bottom of what causes it, was it lack of light or using the Cinemagama, etc.

Does anyone know of a filter I could use in FCP6 to reduce this noise?

Cheers

Kevin

Kevin,
I suggest you take your V1E and some footage to an electronics dealer and hook up to an HD television via HDMI before you add filters (an drastically increase your render times). Also if there is a broadcast dealer in your area they may have an HD CRT monitor that you can connect via the Component Out.

The Cinema Display is not the best for judging quality.

For about six months, I shot my FX1 with automatic gain on, not realizing that I had to actually select out to a manual 0 gain setting if I wanted assure that setting.

You sound like you are probably on the ball on that, but if it is the same as with the FX1, you actually have to select gain, and use a zero gain setting to assure it is not adding gain. It is something a bit counter intuitive, that I thought I was doing right.

I second that. I mean no offence Kevin, but are you 100% sure no automatic gain kicked-in? I mean, with "a professional DP light", and "shutter speed at 25" - the "F-Stop was usually around 2.8" statement would suggest you might have ND filter on. If that was the case, and you didn't make sure the Gain was actually set to 0 dB manually, it might as well go up to some 9-12 dB! Because you see - when in auto, this camera firmware may apply gain first - before trying anything else (like opening the iris or decreasing shutter speed). And if both the iris and shutter were indeed manually fixed, it will apply gain for sure - unless you manually fix it to 0 dB.

I can assure you that when fully controlled, the V1E is capable of superb and noise-free performance!