NOISE!

So there have been a few posts on boards about potential noise issues with the HMC150. I honestly hadn't seen it myself, and I wrote off most of those reports as user error. Indeed many of those threads ended with a resolution that saw some combination of resetting the camera and using different scene files.

I also never had a way to monitor my footage outside of my computer until recently. So when I finally sat down to look at the footage I shot from a wedding this past weekend, I was shocked. There was noise, everywhere... in shadows, which wouldn't be all too surprising, but also in highlights and in perfectly lit scenes. I went back and checked some of my previous footage. I saw a little bit of noise, especially in the shadows, but the footage looked good otherwise. So something happened to my camera just before this wedding shoot.

Here's a sample still from this shoot: noisy mess

So the last couple of days whenever I had some downtime I've been tweaking and testing. I reset the camera, which I'm not 100% sure actually truly reset the camera as much as at least rest the scene files and menu (see this thread for more information) and then searched through the HMC150 board at DVX User and found Barry Green's scene file recommendations. The results were noticeably better and returned my level of satisfaction with this camera.

I noted that the camera looked the best shooting 720p 60, even though the "native" shooting rate of this camera is suppose to be 24p. I noticed just a tiny bit more noise in 24 vs. the 60p footage. Here's a 60p still post-camera reset and using new Scene File settings: much better. There is still some noise present here, but (at least to me) it's much softer and not the hideous distortion you see in the other still.

Ultimately I'm not really sure what happened to my camera. And if you find yourself shooting with yours and you have noise, everywhere, it's not suppose to be this way. I think we have to accept the fact that we're going to have some noise/compression, seeing as how this is not full blown uncompressed HD we're shooting here, but the footage should look relatively clean and beautiful. I'm going to continue to do more testing but I'm definitely going to be much more on guard with what is happening with my camera and you better believe I'll do some last minute testing prior to a big shoot to make sure the camera hasn't gone wonky again.

Note: The Scene File setting tweaks were as follows:

Detail: +2

VDetail: +2

Detail Coring: +1

Chroma +2 (I think this should probably be returned to 0 as the resulting image becomes just a little too saturated, but you might prefer this)

Master Ped: -20

Cine-Like V