How to Shoot Low Light Settings with a Canon XH A1

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to talk about lower light situations and setting up your XH A1 and shooting those. This basically means nighttime or indoors with lower light. Typically indoors in general, even if it's daylight outside, if you don't have that many windows in the room, it's going to be a lot darker. A couple tips on that. First off, one thing you can do is lower your shutter speed. Bring the number down and you're letting more light into your picture. Basically, you get a brighter picture without having to do anything else. Just remember that once you get below 24, you can really start to tell that your shutter is low because you get those tracing images. Remember your Iris ring, set it, you may want to open it up to let in more light and you can get that better picture. Definitely remember to have your ND filter off. If you go from outside to inside and you forget that it's on, you're going to be like, 'Man, it's really dark in here', you've got to turn that off. Pretty much a last resort would be to use the 'Gain'. Here's the 'Gain' switch down here. See there's an 'L', 'M', 'H', there's low, medium, high and you can just switch that on to any of those settings. The thing about Gain is, it's digitally lightening the picture, so, you get some digital artofacting, like pixilation. Definitely, a last resort. I only use that if it's so dark I can't see anything. I'll go ahead and accept that I need a little bit of gain or else I won't see anything. The other option is the 'AGC' which is auto gain control. I really recommend turning this off, or else your gain control, the gain will be fluctuating all the time. Whereas, I like to have it off and set my Iris and my shutter before it starts just messing with the gain. But, if you're into the auto functions you could turn that on, but I don't recommend it. Then, when it's off, you can set the gain manually with that switch. A few tips about shooting in lower light."