Noisy footage from a DV cam

I have a friend who stumped me with a question.

He's capturing some footage shot with a Sony DV handycam, and capturing it via Firewire 400 with the DV NTSC setting.

The quicktimes that he's bringing in are noisy - or noisier than DV should be. A straight line painted on a wall gets aliased and shifts in the raster.

He asked me if I knew what was causing this, and the only answer I could provide is a shrug of the shoulders and a "well, that's just DV". Am I right? Or is there a better capture/compression setting that you should use when pulling off a consumer level videocamera?

This just just a personal video for a blog that my friend is cutting together, and he seems to think that other YouTube based videos look much better and much less blocky than his camera. My suspicion is that it's just DV, but my friend is a mo-cap graphics guy with an extra-sharp eye for these details.

So is there a better way to capture than the DV preset? Is there a codec setting that could be optimized for this?

Which camera is he using?


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I can't count how many times this has been said in this forum: DV is DV. Even if you bump it up to a better codec, you don't get a cleaner file...just a bigger one. If the camera $uck$... the footage is gonna $uck. The best you can do is apply a Deartifactor to the footage in FCP... either Magic Bullet or I believe our friend Graeme Nattress has something as well.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

J, you haven't provided enough info about the footage. Was it shot in poor lighting? The aliasing issue you mention usually would have nothing to do with noise. Aliasing can be seriously increased with wrong settings in the camera.

Last summer I had a big project with a lot of low light/high noise footage. I used the Noise Reduction filter in CHV-Electronic's Repair Collection and it did a amazing job. It won't work on everything. Some types of surfaces confuse it and you get banding. But overall it's great. The client's jaw was on the floor. Looooooong renders though. Good for an octo mac.

Hey Joe -

Yeah, I agree with you that DV is DV. That was my first reaction, too, and I'm 90% sure that's the final answer. That margin of doubt mostly stems from me not having a solid, top to bottom understanding of the FCP codec/capture system.

I think I can stick with the answer <b>DV is DV</b>, and call it that until I get a chance to see the footage myself. Backing that, I like Sprocketz explanation that it's a camera problem, not an FCP problem. Thanks.