HVX200 grainy blues and blacks

Hello all

I am shooting with the HVX200 in the Gates housing and am having a bit of trouble with the scene files. I haven't been able to program any scene files that look good at depth, everything is grainy. I have all gain controls turned off, but the blues and blacks still have too much grain. I was wondering if anyone has come up with any settings that look good. I have put a showreel on my website at www.underseaproductions.com/stock_footage.html if you would like to have a look at some of the shots that worked.

I have attached a grab from one of the worst affected shots.

So that will be my next test... is there anyone else out there using the HVX underwater, it seems like a very small club at the moment.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Ah ok

you found out the hard way that the HVX is a bit grainier than other cameras.

Still there are certain things you can do. Try B-Press gamma to crush the blacks. Master Pedestal no more than -5. You'll lose some detail in the darker edges but it should remove quite a bit of the noise.

You can also using detail coring to +2 or even +3 to reduce noise. Save it as a scenefile custom for darker scenes. Then switch when you hit that circumstance.

Oh I didn't see you were using SF Spark. Don't use it. It pushes the chroma level which gives that chroma noise you are seeing in that pic. Forget what I said earlier. Set your custom scene file to zero everything. You may want to up the detail level up to +4.

Try that first.

Josh,

Just had a look at your showreels...Beautiful..There's some fantastic stuff on there...

Was the High def footage filmed with the panny...What lights are you using..??

Dive safe

DeanB

Oh I didn't see you were using SF Spark. Don't use it. It pushes the chroma level which gives that chroma noise you are seeing in that pic.

Drew, what is SF Spark?

Josh, I thought your demo HD reel was great! All with the HVX200? Adam Wilt of DV Magazine did an interesting (to me, anyway...) write-up on his tests with the HVX200, and here's what he found. Don't know how much of this is relevant to uw situations, though.

Mary Lynn

Josh,

 

Just had a look at your showreels...Beautiful..There's some fantastic stuff on there...

 

Was the High def footage filmed with the panny...What lights are you using..??

 

Dive safe

 

DeanB

Thanks Dean

Yep, all shot with the HVX200.

L&M HIDs for the close up stuff

Cheers

Drew, what is SF Spark?

 

Josh, I thought your demo HD reel was great! All with the HVX200? Adam Wilt of DV Magazine did an interesting (to me, anyway...) write-up on his tests with the HVX200, and here's what he found. Don't know how much of this is relevant to uw situations, though.

 

Mary Lynn

Thanks Mary Lynn

SF stands for Scene File and Spark is one of the preset scene files the camera ships with.

Yes the HD reel was all shot with the hvx200, and thanks for the link, not much there for the underwater shooters unfortunately - seems to be a common problem.

Drew

As you know, the camera ships with programmed settings and to be honest, I don’t even know what neutral is for most of the settings :

Operation type [Video cam/Film cam],

Syncroscan[Yes, 1/48],

News Gamma[On/Off],

Gamma[HD Norm, Low, SD Norm, High, B. Press, Cinelike D, Cinelike V],

Knee[Auto, Low, Mid, High],

Matrix[Norm 1, Norm 2, Fluo, Cine-like],

Skin Tone Dtl[On, Off],

V Detail Freq[Thin, Mid, Thick].

The rest of the settings :

Detail level,

V Detail level,

Detail coring,

Chroma level,

Chroma phase,

Color temp,

Master Ped,

A. Iris level

are numbers so I assume 0 is neutral for them.

Thanks again for your input in advance.

Josh