how come low light level performance of A70 is better in mov

[Snoopy]

i am the very happy owner of an A70 for three months....

when shooting in low light situations (such as my son's indoor basketball games) i have found that i can take much better exposed movies than i can still pics...

this occurs so much that i have resorted to taking primarily movies of things that have motion with them rather than stills in lower light conditions.... trying to push the stills with the iso to 400 and the like resulted in unacceptable pics....

i have some ideas of why this may be, but thought i would ask here first to see what y'all think...

thanx for any light (pun intended) you can shed on this topic....

[tgnych]

have exactly the same problem (see my posting 'blurred image')!
am surprised by this problem.
have also reported the problem to canon and will post any useful feedback. their latest questions were whether i did use the Night Scene Mode (i did and it didn't change anything) and whether the focus did work correctly (which it does).

[Snoopy]

thanx for the confirmation....

as an engineer with some DSP experience here is a thought....

i think the engineers at Canon are doing something smart with this.... at a 640x320 resolution movie mode you have better than three times the resolution of actual pixels available (they reduce them for performance both in shutter speed and memory size)... that means that you actually have better than 10 real pixels of data per recorded pixel in a frame of a movie... well, if they integrate the light over those 10 pixels that would mean that you would have up to 10 times the amount of brightness possible for a movie frame, hence the better low-light capability of the movie vs. a still at higher resolution... now i have not tried a lower resolution still to see if it does it there also.... but it is a thought....

if you have a contact at Canon i would ask about this...

thanx again....

[Drbeagle]

Snoopy, interesting thought about that. We ought to be able to take some low light stills and run them through such a filter. Do you know of any commercial software that would do this or do I just need to spend some time in Matlab?