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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

How much noise is acceptable in low light?

That is to be expected from an underexposed image from any camera. Also, when shooting in tungsten light you will have a noisier blue channel which will add noise to your image when properly balanced. This can be corrected with a blue 80A of 80B filter when shooting in tungsten light.

I've heard this before and I disagree, those filters will just deprive your green and red channels of light, making them noisier...

They are only useful in cases where your red or green channel is clipping under tungsten lights. These blue filters will cut red/green light, allowing you to open up and give your blue channel more light without clipping your red/green.

In low light situations where you are underexposing and cannot open up to let in more light, optical color correction filters will only cut more light and increase noise in your images.
 
I've heard this before and I disagree, those filters will just deprive your green and red channels of light, making them noisier...

They are only useful in cases where your red or green channel is clipping under tungsten lights. These blue filters will cut red/green light, allowing you to open up and give your blue channel more light without clipping your red/green.

In low light situations where you are underexposing and cannot open up to let in more light, optical color correction filters will only cut more light and increase noise in your images.


I've been filtering with an 80C when using tungsten studio lights. Brings the color temp to 4400K-ish, only 600K from native as opposed to 1800K when not filtering. I'd rather have equal amounts of channel noise than just the blue channel screaming at me. I usually have enough overall light though. Not sure if this the best practice but it has been working for me so far.
 
I've been filtering with an 80C when using tungsten studio lights. Brings the color temp to 4400K-ish, only 600K from native as opposed to 1800K when not filtering. I'd rather have equal amounts of channel noise than just the blue channel screaming at me. I usually have enough overall light though. Not sure if this the best practice but it has been working for me so far.

If you have plenty of light, that's probably not a bad idea. If you really want the same levels for each channel, you may want to use a 30CC Full minus green filter on the lens too since in some brief tests I did, I found that the green channel often clips first when the other two channels are balanced, and that is also why highlights always look pink. I found that a +30 correction in post corrects the pink highlights and balances the channels so doing that optically with a full minus green correction it seems would balance all the channels and save some highlights in the green channel in some cases.
 
Do you see the f-stop on the touch screen? If not, there's something wrong with the electronics. If you see it, you should be able to control it over the whole range.

Uli, yes I do see the f-stop that starts at 4 and goes up (don't have the camera in front of me right now but will check tomorrow.
 
We shot a commercial Yesterday with tungsten at 3200K. 350GB worth and all the footage is noise free. No blue filters or gels on the lights.
 
While on the topic of noise, my two cents - Shot part of a music video on a beach against a pitch black sky (10pm no moon). Now after setting the ISO to 320 to expose the picture correctly for the least amount of noise (also with a 50/85 at f/1.2) I notice that, when I turned RAW ON/OFF that the image with RAW ON had no noise at all in the blacks and with the RAW OFF I was getting noise. Just an interesting find - not sure if anybody has experienced anything like that, but an interesting find none the less.
 
What do you mean by RAW on/off? RED is always recording RAW.

If you need pitch black, you need some grading. No electronic sensor is recording true black, never ever! It is recording very dark, noisy gray (or you need to cool it down to zero degrees Kelvin…).

Typical video cameras hide that by tweaking the image in camera. RED is just showing you what's there, and you need to do the aesthetic decisions in RCX or other grading applications.
 
Franks is correct. Raw on/off in the monitoring.
 
I can say one thing that helped me a LOT with getting way less noise in low light was using 6:1 compression. I will never use 8:1 in low light ever again.
 
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