Help setting the gain on my camcorder

[joeGross]

I am having a issue that i need help with.My church currently records service with a canon gl2,I know it's a little old but we are about to purchase a xa10 soon.My problem is the picture quality,we have one of older churches with stained glass windows.What ends up happening is in the middle of service, the sun gets bright and messes up the picture.We have the gain set to 12dbs on morning services and if it's night services we set it to 18dbs.Why does anybody know why the picture have so much noise in it?

[rs170a]

Any time you add gain you're adding noise to your picture. Bumping it up to +12 or +18 is going to make it a lot noisier. Hopefully your new camera will be more sensitive so that you won't have to bump the gain up that much.

 

Mike

[paulears]

The trend towards cleverer cameras and bigger sensors and all that often means they need lots of light. thirty years ago, all the camera manufacturers were using low light as the selling feature. Now, they don't seem to care about low light, thinking users want more gadgets.

[SafeHarbor]

On my old Sony VX-2000, I could go up to +9 gain, while my Sony FX7 HDV camera can't handle more than +6 without the image getting really grainy.

 

Here's a tip – set the shutter to manual, and change from default 60 down to 30, and this will brighten the image by a stop or two. With fast motion/fast pans, this could add a little bit of a strobing, but for a church service you should not notice any ill effects, just a brighter picture. I've done this for years when shooting wedding services in darker churches.

 

Thanks

 

Jeff Pulera

Safe Harbor Computers

[Author]

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