EASY LOW LIGHT VIDEO SETTINGS! _ Reduce Noise In-Camera!

As highly requested from my low-light photography guide, in this video, I'm gonna share with you some fire tips to improving your terrible low-light videos. But we're gonna do something a little different in addition to sharing some tips. We are also gonna do a mock shoot on location so we can share with you guys how we approach a scene and dial in our settings for crispy low-light results. So I randomly have an ice cream right now because Vivian's actually holding the camera to shoot us, but today's mock shoot's gonna be with my friend David here. So the whole premise of this short shoot is that he's getting off work, it's late at night, but it's still no excuse to go capture some amazing night-scape photography. And if you're really tired, just drink some coffee. Or ice cream. Yeah, or ice cream, sugar rush. It's my ice cream. So let's start off with tip number one, know your ISO limit. The higher the ISO you shoot, the more grain and noise gets introduced into your shot. So here's my recommendation. If you're shooting with a full-frame camera, try not to go past 6400. If you're shooting on a crop-sensor APS-C camera, try not to go past 3200. And if you're shooting with a micro four-thirds camera, try not to go past 1600. Again, these are just suggestions. Some cameras can shoot beyond those ISOs and still look pretty clean, but I would say test them out first and see what you're comfortable with. So my ISO limit would be 6400 on this full-frame Sony a7 III. Now, I've shot and tested this camera before, 12,800 still looks pretty good, but I'm gonna hover around 6400 just to be safe, and there's no reason for me to really push past that. I try not to shoot in too dark of a situation anyways, because if there's not any sort of lighting on your subject or whatever it is you're shooting, then it's still not gonna look that great no matter how high of an ISO your camera can shoot at. All right, so we're in this alleyway right now with these nasty orange tungsten lighting, but David's seeing a great shot here. We're actually gonna be shooting over on this side. It looks great on photograph, not so great for video, of this very popular cellular network, which we'll not name, but he'll be shooting through here, and I'm kind of seeing a shot. If we come over here, we have this little, I don't even know what to call this, but it's a different lighting source right here, and I'm thinking of having some sort of separation, some sort of lighting separation. So David can be shooting right here, and I'll put him more towards the light here. That way, he's separated from these nasty tungsten walls. So let's see what that looks like. Tip number two, shutter speed. Remember that golden rule. Always double the frame rate that you're shooting in. If you're shooting 4K, 24 frames per second, then you gotta make sure that your shutter speed is one over 50. Now, you don't wanna go over that because it will actually darken the image, and we want as much light coming to the sensor as possible. Now, you might be wondering, why not do the opposite? Why not shoot at a lower shutter speed to allow in more light? Unfortunately, that would make each frame super blurry with unnatural-looking motion, and we don't want that. Tip number three, avoid shooting in slow motion. As you guys know, as you raise that shutter speed, it's gonna darken the footage. So if we were to shoot in 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second, and we're hitting that ISO limit, we're gonna get grainy, noisy, low-light, slow-motion footage. Unless there's a lot of light, I would consider shooting in 60 frames per second, but for the most part, never 120 frames per second. All right, so this is a much more trickier scene than what we're doing right now. We're actually gonna start the camera from the bottom where David's holding it, and I'm gonna raise it up. So that way, these cars right here with their headlights are gonna give him a little bit of hair light as he's crossing the street. I have no idea what that looks like. We just completely winged it right now, but it might be a dope shot. Who knows? Let's try it out. Tip number four, cliche tip, but use fast aperture lenses. F2.8 minimum, F1.2 if you got that baller money. The lower the number, the more light you'll let into the sensor, and this will help you keep under your ISO limit and possibly even allow you to shoot in slow motion with cleaner results. However, bear in mind that the issue with shooting at a wider aperture is that the depth of field is gonna be much thinner, so it's hard to keep focus on a subject, especially if they're moving towards or away from the camera. In this video, even though we're using the Zeiss Bodice 25 millimeter F2, 40 millimeter F2, and 85 millimeter F1.8, I try to keep around F2.8 for all of those lenses for a majority of the shot to make sure that I have my subject in focus as much as possible without introducing too much noise and grain. Tip number five, find available lighting. So I love finding stores like these with giant window lighting pouring out to the street because one, it's free, two, it's soft, and three, it looks amazing. All right, so here's how we're gonna play with the giant lighting source. I'm thinking we're gonna have David start from that side walking down. So as he walks down, he's gonna stop right here where most of that available lighting is, take out his camera from his backpack, and then walk out of the frame. So we're gonna see what that looks like. Tip number six, bring your own light. So freaking bright, turn it down. Oh shoot, I'm so sorry. All right, so we have David right here in the middle with the amazing focal lights right behind him, but he's looking a tad bit too dark. So let's introduce a little bit of light. Oh, sorry, blinded him for a second, but this light here is actually not even that powerful right now. It's only at 35%, a bi-color light, Viltrox LED light that I bought three years ago, 30 bucks only. And it's doing a great job lighting him because the area is pretty dark, but just a cheap light like this will get him nicely lit. So we're gonna get a shot right here. Tip number seven, time-lapse. This is technically cheating because we're not really taking a video. We're taking a bajillion photos and just compiling them later and animating them. But hey, do you see any noise? I don't think so, so whatever. The beauty of time-lapse is that you don't need a fast lens. Most of my time-lapses are between F4 to F9 with my ISO set to 100. And generally, one second exposure is good enough. And of course, if you can afford it, get yourself a noise-reducing plugin for Premiere and After Effects. It ain't a miracle worker, but it can help clean up a good amount of noise if you're in a pinch. I don't personally use them, but I've seen other filmmakers got decent results with softwares like Neat Video. So did I neglect to talk about picture profile throughout this entire video? Not really, because I didn't really shoot with a picture profile tonight. For broad daylight scenes where I need to preserve the highlight details, I would use Hyper Log Gamma, but since it's pretty dark out, there's no reason for me to shoot with a picture profile. In my opinion, I find a no-picture profile look for low-light good enough. Nice and contrasty, perfect blacks. Plus, it's hard to color grade low-light log footage without making the noise visible, so it's best to get it right in-camera and do very minor color correcting if needed. Anyways, if you enjoyed this video, perhaps you will enjoy my free filmmaking course as well. That's right, free. You will learn how to utilize different focal lengths to tell your story, best video settings for your camera, and how to perform basic but powerful cinematic movements. If you haven't already checked it out yet, click here on the screen to get started. Meanwhile, I will wait and enjoy my quesadilla. See you guys in the next video. Peace.