Hey everyone. I have the new C6. Overall I am very happy but have noticed noise in the video footage regardless of the lighting condition. I used to have the C1 but got rid of it last year because of poor image stabilization mostly. But when it was bright outside and you were still...no noise!!! This camara is a great improvement over my old one but it seams to me there is more overall noise in the footage especially when its well lit (in comparison to my old one).

The one thing I wonder is that the lens on this one is much smaller...could it be allowing less light to enter and thus more noise?? The C40 has a larger lense like my old one...I wonder if it allows for a cleaner image??



Any thoughts?

West

Hah, that's funny, I was just looking for solutions to this very problem.

There was a question before about which was better, "Neat Image" vs "Noise Ninja" at cleaning up still images, and I got Noise Ninja and am very happy with it, though Neat Image seems to be just as good (from looking at the samples).

As of Dec 23/2005 though, Neat Image has a new software called "Neat Video". Download a sample from neatvideo.com. I tried it out, and it works just as well on AVI movies as Noise Ninja does for still images! Even better, it works as a plugin for VirtualDub (and other video editing software also, can't remember which ones tho). So far I can say that it works really well, but it works very slowly (anything up to 1.0 fps on my Athlon 2600+ machine). I don't know about multicore support, but I think Neat Image makes use of extra cores so perhaps Neat Video does too?

Eventually, in the years to come, software like this will probably be reduced to a chip filter which will be put inline with a MP2/MP4 /JPG compressor (cleaning up noise has another added benefit of smaller compressed files). Furthermore, much more sensitive sensors will hit the market which will eliminate the need for flashes and lights, and perhaps for the need for software like this in the first place.

Still: very cool stuff.

In case you have not already tried it, you may want to try the "dynamic noise reduction" plug in and the "2d cleaner optimized" plug in for Virtualdub. They dont produce quite as good result as Noise Ninja, but they are tremendously faster and free, and once output on a TV, the difference with Noise Ninja is not quite as large as on aPC screen.

Here is an old article that speaks about using the combination of these two filters in Virtualdub

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/cleaning.ars

Regarding the video noise issue, I just stumbled on a Soft setting (page 116 in the manual) for the C6 but it's for stills capture, I think. Maybe if you turn it on, it can also improve the video.

I'll do my own tests as well once I can pry the C6 out of my wife's hands....sigh, well at least I can spend more time reading the manual for the meantime.:sad: