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GH2 | Best hack/settings for extreme low light (haunted house)
  • archstantonarchstanton

    I need to shoot in extreme low light (haunted house) tomorrow night and need to know the best hack and settings to accomplish this. I've been playing around with the ISO limit removal (12800), but there's probably more needed than that. Such as bitrate, GOP, quantizer, film mode settings, etc. I would do more research/testing, but I'm pressed for time.

  • 28 Replies sorted by
  • nomadnomad

    Well, first of all I must disappoint you: the GH2 is not the best low-light camera.

    If you have no other option, get Canis Maioris Night, a 64 GB 95 MB speed Sandisk card and work in Black and White.

    But I'm afraid we may be talking no-light here? Then get a old night-vision Sony camcorder and use IR.

  • archstantonarchstanton

    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.

  • itimjimitimjim

    http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/3945/driftwood-settings-series-6-comp-apocalypse-now-cluster-galaxian-gx1-sedna-canis-etc.../p1

  • griplimitedgriplimited

    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.

  • archstantonarchstanton

    Cool footage. A little too bright for my taste, but still good. We used some small spotlights which gave just enough light where we needed it, but still kept it dark enough to be scary.

  • RRRRRRRR

    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.

  • BlueBomberTurboBlueBomberTurbo

    Invest in Neat Video. It's a lifesaver at high ISO! Even if you can't get the image looking like a polished ISO 160 video, you can still give the grain a pleasing appearance instead of dealing with a blotchy mess.

  • archstantonarchstanton

    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.

  • BlueBomberTurboBlueBomberTurbo

    @archstanton CM Night should be around 12-15 min on 24H on a 16GB card. It's around 45min on my 64GB card. The GH2 cuts off files at 4GB, though, and only some cards will allow it to span, producing an uninterrupted video split into 4GB chunks. 24L's image is great, too, so don't worry about having to use max bitrate. A good portion of the quality is in the matrix.

    At night, use Standard or Vivid. Nostalgic and Smooth will just bring up the noise.

    Neat Video DEMOLISHES Denoiser. I have both. Can't believe I waited so long to get Neat Video. See these samples: http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

    They're not exaggerating. I had video worse than that come out just as clean, if not cleaner, because of the detail available in CM Night. Any intra hack will keep great detail in shadows, but CM Night has the matrix tuned for the best color response possible so far. Here's a sample at ISO 5000 CM Night at 24L:

    The video linked in the description is using Denoiser.

  • archstantonarchstanton

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

  • RRRRRRRR

    Personally, I´d ask myself twice wether it was a good idea to you a lot of de-noising for this work, considering what you are after (where noise can add to the feel). Getting a good clean grain should be priority, in any case and that is easiest to achieve with high bitrate settings (such as gop1).

    Agree, though, that neat video is much more powerful than denoiser. What you have to do though, is re-grain the footage afterwards or it will look like plastic..

    A good thing to know is that an underexposed image will produce horrific noise, so it may be better to push up iso or do what you have to do to get a good exposure.

  • RRRRRRRR

    @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.

  • BlueBomberTurboBlueBomberTurbo

    CM Night in 24L records at almost half the bitrate of 24H. Works great with inexpensive Transcend Class 10 cards.

  • RRRRRRRR

    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:

  • archstantonarchstanton

    That's weird. No matter what recording mode I select with CM Night, it says 'R3m57s' on a 16GB card (SanDisk Extreme 45MB/s)

  • BlueBomberTurboBlueBomberTurbo

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

  • bostonmikebostonmike

    I use Terraquake hack with a 40mm Hexanon lens (cheap lens) in Cinemode 24H for most of my low light shots and they come out awesome, even with ISO 160..no noise. Just light the part of the scene that you want to be seen fairly well, the shadows will look nice and clean. If you can afford a Voigtlander or 20mm pancake all the better, but for if you're on a budget this Hexanon for $50 has been great for me.

  • CRFilmsCRFilms

    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.

  • ipcmlripcmlr

    @archstanton you have recording limit on. If you shoot B&W you can go up in ISO. If you use CM Night you get clean images up to ISO 1600 without post processing. You need noise reduction software over ISO 1600 if you want a clean image.

    Haunted house might look good in B&W plus grainy stuff might look good. Depends on you.

    Something like this:

  • archstantonarchstanton

    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.

  • MeierhansMeierhans

    I must admit that even in lowlight I had the feeling that smooth gives me the best results. The noise might look amplified since shadows are raised a bit - but to me it looked like neat video can handle them better than in other modes. Once cleaned you can crush anyways. This only works with I-only settings like CM Night or Sedna, in my experience the noise gets compressed very different with longer GOPs.

  • fixfix

    @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?

  • archstantonarchstanton

    Day 2 went a lot better. I used CM Night again, H quality, smooth B&W, ISO 12800. Here's the result:

    0.jpg
    600 x 338 - 118K
  • BlueBomberTurboBlueBomberTurbo

    @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

  • archstantonarchstanton

    I just tried Neat Video and the initial results looked good. I have a couple of questions. Do I need to profile each shot or just profile one shot and apply it to the whole video? I'm guessing per shot would be more accurate. And should I put Neat Video at the beginning or end of the effects chain?

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