Does anyone have advice on recording in low light with an HD camcorder?
We recently purchased SONY HDR-SR11 and we want to record some indoors low light nigh scenes without using the night vision feature (its for a suspense-like short film). Can anyone advise on settings to achieve a good shot and eliminate the graininess? The camera records great in daylight situations, low light seems to be a problem. All your experiences and ideas appreciated.
2 Responses to “Does anyone have advice on recording in low light with an HD camcorder?”
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To get rid of the grain, try setting it off of automatic gain control. The higher the gain, the more the picture is going to look grainy. The most you can do is open up the iris, make sure your ND filter is off, and set the shutter speed to 1/60 (or 1/48 if shooting in 24p). Do you have to shoot at night time? There are some filters out there that can simulate night time moonlight conditions, then you can just shoot during the day…
The Sony HDR-SR11 is a consumer-grade, hard drive based, high definition camcorder which stored video to very highly compressed AVCHD files.
It has medium/small lenses and medium/small imaging chips. The low light behavior you get on "auto" (including when you go to "SuperNightShot" mode) is about as good as it gets. That the AVCHD compression is applied is not helping any…
If you want better quality low-light behavior, you need bigger lenses and bigger imaging chips found in better camcorders… The Sony DCR-VX2100 is a standard definition camcorder that will outperform the SR11 in low light because of the larger chips/lenses. The HDR-FX1 and its replacement the FX1000 are high definition camcorder Sony makes that provide very good low-light behavior. Lenses and imaging chips cost – which is why pro gear costs…
One thing you can try is to shoot the video in regular light, then darken it when you edit so it looks like night.