A Canon 7D Killer?

They really didn't say what ISO they were using. So that can be it.
My 7D has more noise in the shadow area than my 5D, but not so much that a little noise reduction in AE can't take care of.

Is there a certain plugin you use Jake on the AE noise reduction? I am just recently starting to play with AE and want to get better at it. I usually keep ISO under 1250 on the 5d, haven't had a rejection yet.

Jake uses the built-in Noise filter in AE but hasn't given up the goods on his settings or technique yet... Not that I have stopped bugging him about it.

I'm impressed Jake, using any amount of noise reduction in Premier Pro CS3 slows a render down from about a minute to a long long time. I gave up trying due to the time. Does AE take a long time to filter noise?

Can't you make a selection of the dark area and just apply a little gaussian blur to mask the noise?

You can and in many situations that might be enough.

I'm using the Thinderbox DeNoise, but that package come at quite a price. Would not have bought it just for the DeNoise, but since I have it, I'm using it. Works well and quite quick.

Here is a really nice tute from our friend Andrew Kramer over @ videocopilot.net - although this tute has to do with "sky replacement", it does lead into noise elimination as well towards the end of the tut. - http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/advanced_sky_replacement/ - of course make of it what you want - but I chuckle at how fast people look for things wrong with new products - "noise in the dark areas" - ??? Come on - for this price I can settle for that and would be more than happy to spend more on glass to let the light in. Look at the list of lenses they used. They are pretty much run of the mill non-special and consumer based lenses. What would you expect? Perfection that only some of us pros can see. Consumers don't care. They don't count rivets. They don't have pro monitors - but they do like to see stuff on their TV's that they shoot themselves. Canon figured that out now. Cool?

You know its funny film grain is a mistake so to speak. Film grain was a flaw, but film did such a good job at capturing imagery that it was overlooked.

Now film grian is romanticized, there are effects to add this 'flaw' to video. People see it in the big budget movies and they think it will help thier video if they have film grain.

I wonder if in the future, compression artifacts and 'noise' effects will be added to video to make it look old timey..... lol Everyone will have uncompressed 2k cameras, and they will add compression artifacts to it to make it vintage.

Hahaha I really hope that isn't the case ironstrike. But to give you an idea why people might prefer the look of film over video, due to the grain, is because (in my opinion) the image is always "alive" I like to say, since the film grain is going to be ever so slightly different on every frame, thus, making it "alive", although with video (and this is considering there is of course ample lighting being used with no digital gain) the image might seem more flat or, in my eyes, "dead" since the image was recorded using 0's and 1' onto whatever medium was used. Of course compression and other factors will add those artifacts that might also make the image move around a bit like film grain, but it usually is pretty consistent in both color and image noise.

I wonder if any of what I just said makes sense to anyone...

But to finish, I think different genres or types of projects call for certain mediums. (Ex. Star Wars with super high-end special effects and a futuristic look would work with the clean and consistent look of video, but a movie like "Pi" works oh-so-well with the choice of a grainy film stock that helped embody the main character's mood and feelings.)

Okay, this wasa shot in low light and still looks awesome:

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosd/samples/eos550d/player_circle/movie.html?high