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Good Low Light With A Bad Low Light Camera?

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im3pic

Can anyone please show or tell me how to get good low light with a camera that is bad at low light? The problem is that there is a lot of noise over the image and the image quality drops a whole lot. I shoot in 640x480 but in low light the footage looks like 320x240. If anyone needs to know the camera is a Canon Powershot S2IS. I would also appreciate it if the solution was free. Colour correction won't work because I want to shoot by a fire and colour correction would just dim the fire and make it look bad.
 
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im3pic said:
Can anyone please show or tell me how to get good low light with a camera that is bad at low light?
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Sure! Step one is: if you don't have enough light, add more...

im3pic said:
I shoot in 640x480 but in low light the footage looks like 320x240.
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Lighting levels can't effect resolution... Little confused here, sorry. Some screen shots would help a lot.

im3pic said:
Colour correction won't work because I want to shoot by a fire and colour correction would just dim the fire and make it look bad.
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Color correction happens in post and a good grader can do a lot, leaving the fire bright as it needs to be while brightening other parts of the image. Chances are though, you need to shoot it in a way where the fire and other objects in the image are the right brightness to begin with.

Again man, stills would help us help you a lot. Hard to recommend a solution to a problem when we don't know what it is.

Welcome to the board!
 
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A camera is a light sensor. It's capturing an image from the light reflected off objects. If there's not enough light then of course the camera isn't going to give a quality image. The sooner you realize this the sooner you can work on getting nice images.
 
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add light... it's been said, but it must be reiterated... more light, or a different camera.... but that'll want more light too.

Cameras capture light. Give it what it wants, we're all slave to the camera here... it's like Audrey 2!
 
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im3pic said:
I got this camera a while back for taking pictures and I wasn't into filmmaking, that is why I want to get a t2i because it's footage looks a lot like 5D footage, I know that you should look at low light capabilities but I didnt care back then.
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Yeah no harm man. If you're just getting into it, no reason why you can't use the camera you have. There's a lot of technique to learn and it applies to any camera, stuff like composition, basic lighting, audio recording, etc. Not to mention the thousand other aspects to consider not even related to the camera dept: production design, casting, locations etc.

Start with what you have, then once you learn some you'll have a better idea about what gear to invest in.

For lighting (a great next step), search the forums here. Lot's of posts about low budget lighting that can be bought at the hardware store and what pro fixtures can be bought for not much more.
 
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Another thing to do is to take the camera into a dark room with the lens cap on and start shooting at different ISO settings... this will let you see which ones give less noise in the darks... you can even blow out the contrast in the editor to emphasize it and see what will get you the least noise at any given lighting range.
 
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