FX1000/Z5 noise
 

Hi Everyone,

Any of you guys notice the FX1000/Z5 is a noisy camcorder out of the box? After Tweaking a profile I was shocked at how clean it was compared to the XHA1. I actually purchased the HMC-150 and was not happy with the resolution and the codec. I have a Quad PC and Vegas 8.0c and after color correcting a few clips it was just to processor intensive for me. After regretting selling my XHA1 at that point I sent the HMC-150 back and thought I'd try the FX1000 for now and see if I can get by for a year till the next cam and I must say I'm really impressed with the Camcorder. Really good dynamic range for the chip size and pretty clean up to 9db with a tweaked profile. I could see my self using 12db and 15db under really bad situations. On the XHA1 I could not go higher than 6db. I'm pretty happy with this purchase but will miss the XLR inputs for now. I have a way around that for now. Nice sharp image and very nice LCD. Has any noticed the amount of noise out of box? Thanks

Monday

Are you talking about audio noise or video noise? I guess it doesn't matter though, as for me, actually, the answer is no to both. I do see some grain at 12dB, but audio-wise, I find the camera shockingly silent when a tape is running through it.

Sorry Adam I should have clarified I mean Video Noise from increased grain out of box with no preset used.

Monday
What were your settings?

The Tweaked settings are
Gamma: Cine 1
Black Comp: Off
Knee Point: Low
Color Mode: Cine 2
Color Level: 0
Color Phase: 0
Color Depth: 0
WB Shift: 0
Sharpness: 5
SkinTone DTL: Off

So far I like these settings. Haven't been able to play around that much as I just received the camera today.

I compared my xh-a1 to a fx1000 without any adjustments and was impressed as well how well usuable the fx1000 was even at very high gain values. The grain was there but much finer and less noticeable then with the canon. 6db is also the max I go with the canon but with the fx1000 it was possible to push to 18db and it looked less worse then my canon at 12db. If you say it looks much better tweaked that's pretty impressive.

Yeah I'm really impressed by this camcorder. After looking at the footage down-converted to DVD I can easily use 15db but when delivering BluRay I better stay at 12db max if I need to. Other wise 6db looks really good in comparison to XHA1. Starting to grow on my despite it's many limitations :/

It's with the possible high gain values it manages to get such good low light capability, that is, as long as you don't zoom in. Once you do that it looses it's sensitivity quite fast.
You can allways get it's bigger brother the z5 or Z7 if you want all the goodies the fx1000 is missing.