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  1. Is ISO 1600 usable on a pocket camera?
  2. How to post process the footage to preserve the details?
  3. Can the noise be lowered to usable levels?

I am still in the process of learning my new toy – BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera. One of the tests I did some time ago was to shoot a few clips in the low lighting conditions at ISO 1600, and slightly underexpose the footage. In the next step I was playing with the material trying to recover as much details as possible and minimizing the noise to acceptable levels.

Video samples

BMPCC ISO 1600 performance test

Basic grading

Let’s apply some grading to the footage to bring some life and colour:

The corrections consist of:

  1. Initial adjustments in the CameraRAW section
  2. BMD Film to VisionLOG LUT
  3. M31 LUT from VisionColor
Camera RAW settings
Camera RAW settings
Resolve nodes
Resolve nodes

At the moment footage looks like this (click for full resolution screen grab):

Grading before & after

We increased the nosie by pushing the exposure and we are going to deal with that in AfterEffects:

Filters applied here:

  1. NeatVideo
  2. Unsharp Mask
  3. FilmConvert
Filters
AE filters

The first on reduced the original noise patterns from the BMPCC sensor, the latter one added some 35mm grain and a little bit of curves and analogue color.

The before and after samples can be seen below:

Before & After
Before & After

Summary

It all depends how much we push the material but as long as the adjustments are not massive, the quality should be preserved. NeatVideo seems to be reducing the nosie without affecting the details that much and the grain added in FilmConvert gives this nice analogue touch and boosts up a bit the details that were softened by the denoiser.

Overall I think that ISO 1600 on BMPCC is usable and the footage can definetely bu used if exposed properly.

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