The fun part about a cine camera is that a good one will have no Noise reduction, simply because the quality of noise reduction is determined by processing power, even on a beefy computer good noise reduction especially on resolutions greater than 4k can not be played realtime, so you can imagine noise reduction on a camera is a no go (maybe if you come back in a few years this post will look old).
Another reason to do noise reduction in ‘ post’ is that you can ‘ look back’ so based on the scene and current state of black balance the noise reduction can be refined. A lot of cameras use noise reduction even if they record the ironic ‘ RAW’ format. Kinefinity only executes dark current noise reduction (black balance), which is basically ADC noise, and not part of the visual image. If you use a weak codec its very hard to record noise, because compression works with similarities, and noise make every frame different, thus a frame with too much noise will be compressed much heavier visually than a clean looking image. Another reason is obviously is that a lot of people don’t have time to denoise and want a somewhat clean looking image out of the box, and the last reason is too fool dynamic range tests because they work with a noise threshold, and lowering the noise will make the camera look better in tests like the Ima test.
Oversampling is kind of a noise reduction, basically cancelling out differences between different pixels, and lowering standard deviation, but what if we shoot pixel to pixel in a crop mode on the camera, lets say s35?
I ran a quick non scientific test with a soft lens, which always helps to see the noise samples better, and make it look worse.
I also underexposed it a little bit, to make it even worse. all shot at 3200 iso.
First frame is with neat video denoiser (industry standard super good, but very cpu/gpu intensive,) and the 2nd frame is without,
imagine that in open gate this will look a hell lot less noisy. Please note that I executed neat video in such a way that it doesnt hurt the image, so, all fine details are preserved, so there might still be a bit of noise. a lot of times i first denoise to add grain later on.
Also the fun thing about a close to uncompressed/ raw image like with prores 444 is that it can 100% record a noise profile, and the more untouched a noise pattern the easier its to clean up. Lets look at these images
also i put a link up in higher resolution underneath the photos. Looking forward to your feedback
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4cfrssua5jnn5wu/AAAhMZpL-nHH_0OCbYoEtNCya?dl=0