Against the Grain

Camera tests at our various locations and different lighting situations took up the past couple of days. And I think I have a better understanding of exactly what can be achieved with the HV20/30 to achieve the look that I want.

One thing that I wanted to do from the beginning was shoot this movie entirely on the HV20/HV30 Canon HDV cameras to prove that you can make a high quality product with consumer grade equipment. I had started to worry, however, that my desire to shoot in low-light situations might be compromised by their less-than-stellar low-light performance. That, combined with their lack of true manual controls, of the gain setting especially, had me wonder whether or now I’d be able to shoot how I wanted to with this equipment.

After the last few days, that answer is a definite yes. A major no-no among videophiles is shooting with the gain setting on anything but zero. Gain is that nasty electronic noise that brightens the image to allow for low-light shooting. Only problem is that it looks nasty and is a dead-giveaway that you’re shooting video and shooting amateur video at that. So gain has never been an option.

But I started to question the zero-tolerance for gain policy, especially after watching films shot on both film and video and seeing the amount of grain that was present in certain shots. After shooting at night with all natural light and adding some gain to the image, what grain could be seen looked like exactly that: film grain. Not that nasty blocky video noise that is usually associated with video shot with auto settings, but something that resembled the granular, natural look of true film grain. I don’t know why this is, but it’s a look that is not only acceptable to me, but even desirable. This proved to me that I would be able to shoot as I had wanted, primarily with natural and practical light sources, and still get a good-looking image with that nitty-gritty documentary feel that I had wanted.

So, yeah, that’s great news. There are still many last minute things to be done in preparation. Only three days til production begins.