How does this guy's camera get so bright at night?

H

harmonica44

I wish I had some footage to show but was not able to get any from him yet. But I viewed some of his night footage and it looks insanely good at such a high ISO, with very little noise. On a downtown lit street 800 ISO at f.1.4 is acceptable, but what about doing skyline shots?

His camera can open up to maximum ISO without noise, and with the aperture very sharp. It's a Panasonic video camera, but he did not remember the model number. But I saw it on a big screen HDTV and it looked fantastic. Any cameras I can get that hopefully are not too much that has such good ISO? Cause doing night shots of city skylines, are too dark with a DLSR. A lot of cameras have to be ordered, so I don't know what the ISO is like till I see that camera.
 
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Or just sounds like you need to shoot something simpler at your current state as a filmmaker. Don't get caught up on trying to get everything to look cinematic. Work more towards and getting scenes done. If you feel that you can't get certain things done with the amount of cast, crew, and knowledge, then pull back a bit to actually get a finished product. If you hang on things, then you'd never get anything done. Quit second guessing yourself. Filmmaking isn't all about what you learn from text. It's what you learn by being hands on and out there actually filming. You can't learn if you don't actually try. Baby step it. Understand the basics then broaden your knowledge.
 
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Okay thanks. Why shoot under low light though? Doesn't having to denoise take away quality of the movie a little? The director who I worked for and help make his movie... He shot under normal light bulbs as his lighting kit, with the aperture closed all the way to achieve deep DOF. He also had the ISO on auto. He then later brightened the picture to brightness and their was a lot of noise, but he denoised it.

Is this a good way to go if you want to get a movie distributed like he is aiming for, or should you just shoot with bright lights to begin with, even if it's worth the extra money? Especially if it's indoors, and you have power sources, what's the point of fixing the noise in post later, unless fixing it produces pro results, and it's no problem.
 
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There are hundreds if not thousands of productions that should have never been on the distribution line but were anyway. If you have the money, people will produce.... hell even if you just want to distribute them yourself via online it's still being distributed.
 
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As with all of these aesthetics questions, it depends on what you're going for... if you like the look of high ISO footage run through a denoiser, then that's exactly the way you should shoot. There's definately an ideal... lenses like to sit around f/5.6-f/8 and produce the highest quality images there... so you light to that ideal and you'll get "Good" images... do they do what you want in terms of story telling? If not, then it's the worst footage you could have.

The only real way to know is to shoot a ton of stories and figure out what works and what doesn't... it's an experience thing that can only be learned by doing.
 
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