First, I've heard many cameras have worse noise at "tweener" ISOs (ie: the ones that lie between the regular 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200). Dropping to ISO 1600, or even moving up to ISO 3200 may reduce noise.


Going from f/2.8 to f/1.4 would drop the ISO by 4x (from 2000 to 500), which would greatly reduce the noise. You'd need a fairly wide angle lens though, to have any depth of field to work with at that sort of aperture though. A 35mm f/1.4 on a 7D would give you a foot of sharp focus at a distance of 8.5ft or so. (Using DOFMasterto check). A 24mm f/1.4 would give you a foot of sharp focus at 6ft or so. If you wanted a deeper DOF, you'd need to stop down the lens, and increase ISO again, or find some way to light the scene (or upgrade to a 1DmkIV. Vincent LaForet's Nocturne was with a mkIV at ISO6400 with a quick post process noise reduction, and looks fantastic).





Depending on the quality of the video resizing on the camera, you may be able to do better by shooting at a larger resolution. Shoot at 1080p at ISO 1600, then noise reduce and downsample to 720p. The downsampling should help mask and loss of sharpness from noise reduction.