How to match C300 / FS100 with a Panasonic GH2: Improve low light image quality from iso 12800 and 6400

Video and text via apefos

Learn how to tweak NeatVideo noise reduction settings to get great low light image quality from Panasonic Lumix GH2 at ISO 6400 and 12800. Also usefull for other iso.

GREAT NEWS: I saved all iso noise patterns and four noise reduction presets for neatvideo so you can download them and load to your noise reduction process. the link is in this site thread in post number 10:

personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1986/how-to-improve-low-light-image-quality-from-iso-12800-and-6400


PAY ATTENTION:

If you think the person face is plastic or digital look you can decrease the amount of luminance noise reduction adjusting the Y slider between 0 and 30 instead of 50. This way the image will be sharper and more detail will be preserved. In this video tutorial the Y slider was set to 30 in the 12800 iso footage.



The main slider control to tweak in Neatvideo is the Y slider. Use similar settings showed in the tutorial and increase or decrease the Y slider to get the look you want.

Also It is very important to capture a good noise pattern at the same footage iso as showed.

Get the noise reduction filter at neatvideo.com

Remember this: 1600 or 3200 iso is good enough for most low light situations if you have a fast lens. And 1600 / 3200 iso has a good quality in GH2. 12800 and 6400 iso is just for extreme low light situations.

In this video I did shoot some very dark situations, as you can see the luximeter shows 1 lux and also 0 lux (something between 0 and 1 lux). In these situations it was very dark and the camera see more than the human eye. The recorded image is lighter than it is. I used iso 12800 / 6400, shutter from 40 to 125 and the 55mm lens in f1.2 The camera can see more dark if you set the shutter to 25 and iso 12800 at f1.2.

In the other situations I needed to stop down the lenses and/or increase shutter speed to keep iso in 6400 and 12800. I could have used a lower iso. I just used 12800 and 6400 to show the noise reduction tutorial.

To see how good GH2 is at 1600 and 3200 iso without noise reduction see this video:
vimeo.com/26611738
If you want to denoise 1600 and 3200 iso watch the tutorial and use similar settings. You can download the neatvideo presets in the link above.

Hardware used in this tutorial:

GH2 Hack 40Mbps 1920 x 1080 24p
Cinema, Contrast 0, Sharpness -2, Saturation +2, Noise Reduction -2

Lenses:
Rainbow S48 4.8mm 1.8 (ETC mode) (rear focus barrel removed to fit c-mount/m43 adapter)
Sigma 20mm 1.8
Nikon 55mm 1.2
Lumix 14-42mm 3.5-5.6

Cheap crap tripod