What you're looking at right now is nighttime footage from the black magic pocket cinema camera 4K With a lens wide open at 2.8 and ISO levels up to 4,000 It's surprising to see footage this clean on this small of a sensor Usually night filming is reserved for full frame cameras as their sensor size makes some top performers in low light But I think the micro 4.3 sensor of the pocket 4K outperforms my APS-C cameras even without denoising in post Now there are a few factors at play here when it comes to making the most out of our nighttime footage and that's what we're going to be talking about today The top three things to consider when filming at night I prioritize in this order first is location Second is gear third is color grading so one observation I've made is shooters tend to rely on their gear to do the heavy lifting for them So if filming at night requires a camera that performs well in low light and said camera is available Then go for it But if such tools are not in your arsenal I wouldn't suggest pushing whatever camera you have beyond its limits This is evident in my APS-C versus low light video if the camera isn't ideal for the shoot then pushing it beyond the ideal settings will give you barely usable footage at best one of the best ways to improve any shot is to control lighting and the easiest way to add light at night is to go where the lights are my boy James and I did a bunch of Location scouting driving down many streets searching for streets that were not only well lit But also had an industrial aesthetic to fit the look of the video selecting locations to light up your shots We'll give you a lot cleaner results as opposed to relying on your camera's exposure capabilities Where you risk dirtating up the frame by boosting ISO too much and adding noise or adding too much motion blur by Dropping the shutter speed now. I just suggested how important location and lighting are But what your gear can do is just as important for this shoot I use the black magic pocket cinema camera 4k along with the Sigma 17 to 50 and there are a bunch of features that work in our Favor for filming at night first the lens opens up to f2.8 Which is good, but it's not an ideal low light savior However, when you mount it to the 0.71 x speed booster our maximum iris is now f2 Which is a huge improvement now unlike full frame cameras I don't have the luxury to crank up my ISO with this micro 4th-third sensor and expect noise refootage or do I With all of this already amazing features like being able to shoot 4k 60 12-bit raw the pocket 4k comes with dual native ISO Which kicks in at ISO 1250 this increases the gain of the signal while dropping the noise floor Making the footage brighter with less noise at a higher ISO But wait there's more according to the dynamic range chart in the manual We actually gain more stops below middle gray giving us a lot more detail in the shadows When color grading night footage all I do to keep my image looking clean and noise free is make sure there's enough Contrast to push my shadows down and make my highlights pop typically what needs to be seen will be lit up by the highlights So there's really no need to boost up the shadows noise usually creeps up in the shadows anyway So crushing the darks just enough to hide it is an effective way to avoid denoising although denoising is a very useful tool Because we're filming at night and everything is hard to see anyway We don't want to lose any detail by softening everything up through denoising comment below your night filming tips if you have any I'm always looking to learn new things to help my work alone if you found this video informative or at the very least entertaining Don't be shy to show me some love hit that like button down below also subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see y'all in the next one peace