Canon EOS SL1/100D Video Noise and Dynamic Range Test Footage
Channel: quicksurfinternet
Date: 2015-07-09

This video has test footage taken with the Canon EOS SL1/100D to test noise performance and dynamic range handling.

Differences from what I said in the video: No FFMPEG noise reduction was applied. I originally concerted the clips and applied the default hqdn3d settings at the same time, and it looks terrible, so this is a basic ffmpeg concat while upgrading the footage to h.264 h444 intra and PCM audio in a .mov container.

Camera Settings: The camera was shot with the prolost flat picture profile (http://prolost.com/blog/2012/4/10/prolost-flat.html), manual exposure with Daylight color balance, and starting from ISO 200 up to 12800 to judge noise performance and dynamic range.  This video has not been color graded or edited other than converting to an intra codec and all the individual clips have been concated together into one longer clip.

My thoughts: 

At 330MB a minute, from ISO 200 to ISO 800 it is completely usable with little if any noise reduction applied. 

I didn't bother with ISO 100 because ISO 200 looks so good in terms of noise or lack there-of. I'd expect ISO 100 to be stellar.  

ISO 400 and 800 do have more noise, but frankly, unless I needed *super clean* video, I wouldn't bother with any noise reduction there. It's very slight and not really noticeable unless you're looking for it.

ISO 1600 on the other hand, I would not use without at least applying a little noise reduction to clean up the darker parts of the image and smooth out some of the grain structure.  

ISO 3200 and 6400, while they look better than I expected, I would not use unless I just could not slow down the shutter more, open the lens up more, or add more light, and even then, you can get the noise and grain down to maybe 1600 level before ISO 1600 noise reduction before you really started to hurt the picture quality and fine detail rendering.

ISO 12800, totally unusable.  The only time I'd use this is if I was intentionally going for the *grainy cheap camcorder footage* look, and even then, you're way better off shooting at ISO 3200 or 6400 and simply not cleaning it up.