| Jim Snow |
April 16th, 2009 11:21 AM |
Tom, your point is very valid. High gain / grain is never a good thing but there are some shooting situations that require the lesser of two evils. If someone has a no grain obsession, you will wind up with near useless footage in low light situations. If you don't have enough exposure to get reasonable chroma and luma depth, there is nothing you can do in post to bring out what isn't there. When you are shooting, you have to take into consideration the shooting conditions as they are and shoot accordingly.
You can do some pretty amazing things in post to reduce grain with tools such as Neat Video. Sure it will soften the video a bit (but less that you might think), but the resulting edited footage is vastly better than a dark underexposed video. In other words, when shooting, the objective is to shoot the best possible footage considering the realities of the shooting conditions. When the conditions aren't optimal, you have to make compromises that take the actual shooting conditions into account. A slightly soft video that has been degrained in post is vastly better that a dark underexposed one. Who cares if there is no grain in a miserably dark piece of footage!?
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