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Shoot 5K instead of 4K for night scenes?

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nigelsmith

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Hi
I have been given this advice and wanted to get some more opinions.....
Student shoots are 4K, for a 2K finish, and we have data caps based on available storage etc.
What is the advantage of shooting 5K for a night shoot?
I'm guessing it's about reducing noise with the increased downsample.
Is that actually going to be significant?
Or are there other reasons?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice.
Nigel
 
Yes Nigel that would be the biggest advantage. But you also may want to experiment with going to an external recorder for low light situations as I find it's the cleanest. It bypasses the Redcode compression which I find struggles with dark scenes. Dragon will be a lot better with these situations.
 
Thanks for the response Bob.
I do recall a thread some while back suggesting that the redcode-free HD SDI output was less noisy in certain conditions.

Would it be beneficial to reduce compression settings as well?
Nigel
 
You should definitely run your own tests, but two very important factors when shooting darker scenes are compression settings and black shading for the scene/specs at hand. If you start with a proper black shade, your noise should reduce substantially... If you can ALSO use a lower compression setting (like 5:1), the results can be pretty spectacular...

-CK
 
You should also aim to have your WB near 5600K for low light shooting. 3200K will increase the noise in the blue channel significantly.
 
Thanks for the tips guys.
Compression can only produce artifacts from noise if it's set too high and the image is noisy for other reasons though, right?
It can't actually cause noise can it?
Nigel
 
it doesn't matter what WB you set when shooting as that's just metadata.

When I shoot nights I cheat the blue enhancement not by increasing the blue channel and increasing noise, but by rotating the hue in post. The shot below is an image grab from a 4K HD shot using frame summing. Just a small amount of Neat Video applied.

A002_C003_10157I_1024.jpg
 
Last edited:
Paul Russell said:
...

When I shoot nights I cheat the blue enhancement not by increasing the blue channel and increasing noise, but by rotating the hue. The shot below is an image grab from a 4K HD shot using frame summing....
Click to expand...

Paul, can you go over this a bit more? I'm assuming you're talking about a post workflow but what's "frame summing"?
 
Frame summing is part of the recording dialog on the camera. It is like using double (or more) exposure to increase the amount of light that is used for a frame. It's part of the recording dialog section in the menus.

For example, to get a shot like that one, I used the Contax 85mm prime at around f5.6, then programmed in the recording section to a burst of 4 shots of 1/2 second each, then used frame summing (in the Frame Processing dialog) to add up all the light into the one frame. Then after 8 seconds, to repeat etc. Make sure you do a black shade first at that exposure if you want it to look good.
 
Just fired up the Epic and tried it. Very cool. Didn't even know you can do that.

Back to the thread, I can see this technique to be extremely useful for night scenes.
 
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