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Shooting in 12db Gain and Eliminating Grainy-ness in Post
Who doesn’t hate it when they are left with no choice but to bump up their camera settings all the way to 12db (or the dreaded 18db!) because of a poorly lit situation? How about some light, people?!?
Whether you never leave home without them or swear against them, we are all in agreement that having proper lighting at our events makes our production value higher.
But what happens when you bring your light and it’s still inadequate, or when the situation does not allow you to turn on a light? Gain happens! We almost always have to turn our gain up to at least 6 db for our weddings – it’s just the nature of the beast.
For the longest time we used Sony PD-170s, the king of low light, but like many studios, we have already made the jump to HD (Canon XHa1) and every little detail counts when we produce images for HDTVs. We edit with Final Cut Pro, and we have used everything under the sun to try to rid our films of as much graininess as possible – Gaussian blurs, After Effects, Motion, and many more 3rd party plugins.
Nothing came close to cleaning up our footage like Re:Vision’s De:Noise plugin. For any Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, or After Effects users, this plugin is a must.
In the examples below, I used my messy desk as well as some real wedding footage to show some before and after. It will be hard to see all the details of the results on such a small viewing window, but seeing it in your editing suite really shows its power.
Render time is a bear, however, so be prepared. And remember, this is just a tool to make grainy video ALOT better, but not perfect. And it is certainly no substitute for quality shooting on the front end.
De:Noise – Review from Matt Davis on Vimeo
