Shooting in low light at ISO 1250, suggestions?

[Emil]

I recently shot some clips around my university campus at night. I shot everything with a canon 600D at ISO 1250 and did some basic editing in Adobe Premiere. There quite a lot of noise in the picture though. What can I do to reduce noise besides lowering ISO? Does anyone know of any good noise reducing programs/plugins?

Emil

[Francis]

Most of it is pretty underexposed. You are always going to end up with more noise in underexposed shots. You might be better off shooting at 2500 and making it a bit darker to match the scene in post.

[Emil]

Hmm, interesting. So higher ISO might actually give a less noisy result in some circumstances? I'm new to filming in low light and was told to avoid going higher than 1250. But if I read what you are saying correctly, properly exposing the scene should be a priority if I want less noise?

[1%]

Experiment a bit, 2500 was the last usable ISO in my opinion. Correctly exposing is the key, underexposed parts will always have some noise. Removal in post is also possible as is crushing the black down a bit.

[MichalLeder]

Actually I can't see much issue with noise here (I watched in 1080).
Also the exposure for me is OK, it would be weird if you expose night shots with no compensation, they should be approx. -1 EV.
The same as snow daylight shots should be overexposed - you would not like snow or darkness to be grey, wouldn't you?
The problem with these shots IMo is that some of them are out of focus completely. ML focus peak feature would help here much.

[Emil]

Yeah I agree about the focus thing. I basically relied way to much on the autofocus. I noticed it was hunting a lot. Tried to adjust it some manually, but obviously failed at it. I'll try the focus peak feature, I haven't really tried it much yet.

[kihlbahkt]

Neat Video can probably help but it isnt free. I tried the demo in After Effects and I really liked the results. Easier and better than manually de-noising. You can easily find it on the web. There a bunch of others too, some free, some not.

Also set the aperture wide open, reduce shutter speed and shoot in the most lighted areas.

[Betelgeuza]

u can remove chromatic aberrations  to... but if u got shit lens maybe its good to close little aperture ,. with my shotsit works and aberration is less visible witout  removing it