Stay away from locations outside noisy streets or near trains or construction. Don’t record in a location which gives you lots of background noise. You can always darken a brighter, clean image, but if you try to brighten a dark image, the result will always be more video noise. Then, working with a clean image in post, they bring the exposure down and get the dark look for the final image. They place shadows where they should be in a dark scene, but overall, the image is a stop or two brighter. They light the scene much more brightly than the final image will be so that they obtain a clean image. You may think, for example, a nighttime scene should be dark, so you may be tempted to shoot it dark, but keep in mind what professionals do.

Video that’s not lit well enough ends up dark and noisy with muddy colors, and the darker it is, the worse the noise problem.

Noise happens most prominently in the darker areas of video. The best way to avoid it? Use plenty of light and give your video proper exposure. Most of the time, there isn’t. There are ways to mitigate noise, and some of them do a very good job, but it always comes at some cost to quality. This may seem obvious, but many times, productions leave problems like this to be “fixed in post,” expecting there to be some magic button or killer technique which will solve the problem. The best way to deal with noise in your video or audio is not to have any, or if it can’t be avoided, to record it in a way that it’s easy to mitigate.

Lightworks 14 adjust audio levels