Too late to switch cameras, but just out of curiosity what camera in the same price range as the GH2 has better low light performance?

What is 'Canis Maioris Night'? I did a search, but nothing came up.

It will be very low light, not no light.

Not shot with a gh2, but with a 5dmk2. My work went through Halloween Horror Nights at Universal and we came up with the same dilemma. This is what worked for us.

• PA holding a 1x1 Light Panel on external battery pack.
• Host holds a Mag Flashlight and lights his face whenever needed (didn't need it, as the Panels did the work)
• 16-35mm F2.8, keep it wide and open. Images stay decently sharp.

You can see for yourself the scenes where it wasn't lit up and the Panels gave it that boost. Good luck.

Get a 17.5mm f0.95 voigtländer. Sharper than the 25mm (wide open) and wide enough for interiors. 12800 can be useful too, if you shoot black and white. It´s a particular look but it might work well in your case. If you increase contrasts as much as you can it will help to minimize the well known banding issue but you can play around with a shutter speed of 25 if the lighting allows for it (it can create hz interference). If you are shooting 24p that is. Canis Majoris Night works well with night footage, indeed, but I think many settings can work well for you..

A ring-light on the lens might be a good idea too.

I tried the Canis Majoris Night, but the file size was huge (only 4 minutes on a 16GB card). For now, I decided to go with the cbrandin 44 with ISO limit removed. What film mode settings do you think will work best with this?

I also might try the mjpeg low light patch, if I have time.

I have Magic Bullet Denoiser. I don't know how it compares to Neat Video.

Can I reduce the bitrate in CM Night to make the file sizes smaller or will that mess up the way the patch works?

@archstanton I believe you can use the L setting (in 24p) without loosing too much but I can´t say for sure as I have not tried it.. Maybe you will be forced to shoot interlaced if you get lighting interference issues so it´s a good idea to try that out as well.

I don´t know if you find this interesting or not, but I´d shoot bw-dynamic (contrast +2) if I wanted to do something on a haunted house theme.. 6400 / 12000 iso.. and play around as far as would be possible with slow shutter speeds.

Maybe you´ve seen this:

You have to turn off the recording limit in PTool after loading CM Night, before saving new firmware file.

I second @RRRR max ISO is really only usable if you go B&W. Also smooth might give you the best image with the least noise. It will still be grainy, but not the bad digital noise look of color, it will look more like film grain and coupled with the Haunted House theme could be a good look.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I end up using CM Night after all. I shot mostly in 'H' quality, 'Dynamic' film mode, ISO 6400. The footage looked 'ok', it'll probably take a lot more testing to get it right.

@BlueBomberTurbo

Your footage looked trully great. You got a nice feel to it. The shadows seem cruched, but in a good way. You have keeped control of the highlight in a good manner. Is it heavy color corrected?

@fix Not too much grading. I ran it through 5DtoRGB first, then in After Effects I used Color Finesse to set White Balance, a little tweaking with Levels and Hue/Saturation, and added some Unsharp Mask at the end. I did crush the blacks a bit, since the lighting was creating a magenta cast in the shadows up top (you can still see some of it).

The biggest improvement was with Neat Video. It completely blew me away. The issue I had with that video was the lighting used at the track. I was shooting at 1/50, and I couldn't see on the GH2's screen while shooting, but it was creating the usual pulsing effect (I shoot 1/40 there now). Not to mention the overall noise was really chunky. Magic Bullet Denoiser II couldn't get rid of the light pulsing and the odd noise it created, but Neat Video removed just about of all of it, along with keeping just about all the detail available! Also, YouTube killed the shadows. They were nowhere near as chunky in the final video as they appear after uploading. There's smooth detail in the trees in the background.

@archstanton Looking good! I've noticed that if you manage to expose properly, or overexpose without losing highlight detail, the noise doesn't look anywhere as harsh as you'd expect from super high ISO. It's the same thing in photos. I took a bunch at ISO 6400/12,800 on my vacation as B&W JPGs, and the RAWs aren't nearly as bad as I was expecting.

BTW, I tried Neat Video on one of my 6400 ISO B&W vids, which had a TON of grain, and yeah, it completely cleaned it up. Like it was shot at ISO 640 or so. Was even able to add some heavy Unsharp Mask sharpening to it (500, 0.5, 0) without upsetting the smoothness. Neat Video is just amazing. The result is so smooth, you can do almost whatever kind of grading you want to the video afterwards without worrying about bringing up artifacts. Even smoother than a perfectly exposed GH2 video. You can be heavy handed with the NR on high ISO projects, or subtle for a little bit of cleanup on low ISO, and Neat Video will give you the look you need without removing detail. I'm in love! :3