Generally the noise will bite you in the blacks. The VX200 lacks the controls to deal with that but you can improve the situation by crushing the blacks a tad using a Color Curve.

Proceed with caution however as you can introduce some horrid artifacts.

You can also try Mike Crash's free Dynamic Noise Reduction plugin.

Bob.

Hi Bob, where can I download that plug in? What makes me mad, my VX2000 cameras performed awesome tonight, with great color and sharpness. I am very dissapointed in the new AX2000.

I found his website:)

Thing I don't understand is why the AX2000 looked great shooting the musical tonight and then, when I imported it, the footage looks crappy, lots of grain!

What were you monitoring the video on during the shoot?

If the camera's LCD screen then pretty well anything looks good because it's small plus you're seeing the video before it gets encoded.


Bob.

Did you manually set the gain to 0db? Did you even check the gain? When operated properly, the AX2000 can look much better than the old VX2000.

Hi John, the stage for the musical, was well light, infact, I had to drop the iris down to f10. to more steps down and the iris closed. If I zoomed in on a performer, the picture was fine. As soon as I zoomed out, everything around them turned grainy. If the daylight, the camera looks awesome. I don't know whats wrong. The shutter was at 60. I had the iris in the manuel mode so I could adjust for different lighting scenes. If I raised the iris, their faces got washed out, because of the light. I am filming in SD mode to match the vx2000 720 x 480 60i

Here is screen shots:
http://www.midwestvideoproductions.com/test_page.htm

John made a very good point.
Unless you press the Gain button and I think set a value then automatic gain is still being applied. So what'll happen is as you close the iris the camera will increase the gain giving you more noise. Hard to imagine a stage being well light enough to need f10 at 0dB with a 1/60th shutter.

Bob.

I was operating on manual mode. Yes, I found this strange too. The VX2000 were at F6.8 . Maybe there is something wrong with the camera?

I found the problem. There is a switch on the side, low med. and high for the iris. It was set at high, so even when I dropped the iris, to f11, some of the footage was bright and the other parts we're very grainy. I hope this is it!!!!!

"I was operating on manual mode"

Yeah but here's the thing. OK, I haven't played with this camera as we avoid anything AVCHD like the plague however if it's like all the other Sony Sony cameras (Z1, Z5, V1 etc) then it doesn't have a direct true Manual Mode. It has Auto Lock or you can switch that Off.
Once you switch that off though every control is still in Auto. You have to select each one and get it into manual to get eventually to full manual, This has caught me out a few times, thankfully not during a shoot though.

Bob.

let me try to explain that a bit better.

When you switch off Auto Lock you enable manual control of say Iris but the auto exposure circuits are still active so the camera will attempt to use shutter speed and gain to get what it thinks is the right exposure, kind of like aperature priority on a still camera,

What you have to do is select Shutter, select that as whatever and do the same for Gain. Then and only then do you have Manual Exposure control.

Bob.

Bob, how come you don't like the avchd format?

For cameras in general:

Brightness etc. of image seen in LCD depends on LCD's own adjustment. If LCD's own brightness control was adjusted to higher than normal then a picture that looked right at the time would be underexposed to the camera.

F11 is too small, you'll get diffraction effects off the iris, blurring the picture (not visible on LCD as it is too small). Better to use a filter if possible or maybe faster shutter.

Not sure if this is relevant to your situation but auto exposure (AE) typically has settings for spotlight mode etc., maybe useful for a stage performance.

"Bob, how come you don't like the avchd format? "

Everytime I've had to deal with it, especially when downconverting it to SD the artifacts are horrible. It's not just me either. We rented a AVCHD POV camera to a local broadcaster and they had exactly the same problem. When the codec 'breaks' it seems to break badly.

To be honest I don't fully understand what goes wrong with this codec. The theory says it should be better than long GOP mpeg-2 but practice shows otherwise. One theory I have read is that the encoders in the cameras simply lack the horsepower to do a full encode as the computational power required is beyond what can be done in a prosummer camera because of heat and battery drain.
I've only had a very quick look at Panasonics cameras recording AVC-Intra but they do like way better even though they are a bit soft.

Bob.

Hi Bob, I record my special events like recitals and musicals in SD on the AX2000 because I am still using my vx2000's as well on the shots. I filmed a talent show today, which sucked...LOL, but with adjustments and actually learning how to operate this new camera, much better results today:) Like I said, the camera has a 3 lever position for, what I call Iris on the fly. Last night, I had it set to high, whick means I had to bring the iris down to f11 to get a decent look, but a very bad Idea. I didn't know about this switch until this morning. so far, editing with the avchd files has been easy and fast. I did just build a new computer to handle it, so I am sure that helps.

Gain and grain go hand in hand. If you switch off the gain, you get nice clean shots, look here: http://www.vimeo.com/10088936

Lou

Video does not have "grain".
Film has grain, video has noise.
I know I'm sounding like a nerd but the two things are technically and visually quite different. It's not unheard of to add grain to video. It's rarely you'd want to add noise, unless it was to match something being composited.

Bob.

The noise in my videos looks like grain. ;-)

Lou