Video Noise/Grain Reduction
by Craig Bass
on
Sep 17, 2008 at 8:12:30 am
I'm pretty sure that this is an absurd question, and that the answer is no; however, is there anyway to reduce grain/noise in video - particularly that caused by needing to apply gain settings during a shoot.
I have quite a bit of footage shot in very low light; which my Canon XH-A1 seems to handle very well; regardless, I was forced to use gain part of the time, and would like to somehow increase the image quality.
Re: Video Noise/Grain Reduction by walter biscardi on Sep 17, 2008 at 9:21:00 am
Nattress has some grain reduction plug-ins but grain reduction is just a softening of the image. Color has some outstanding tools for grain reduction built in by applying very light blur to the individual color channels that have the worst noise in them.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Video Noise/Grain Reduction by Ben Richardson on Sep 19, 2008 at 4:21:24 pm
Neat Video from neatvideo.com is truly outstanding. (Though they could seriously do with updating their website examples, which don't give a real idea of its power.)
It's a plug-in for After Effects (which I haven't tried) and the open-source VirtualDub (which I have), amongst others. The downside is that it's currently only available for Windows (Mac version in the works apparently).
That said, if you have Intel machines, it works fine in Parallels, etc. We had to do some e x t r e m e noise reduction on HVX200 footage shot at night with way too much gain. I really thought it might be unsalvageable. The mixed-platform workflow was tricky (with VirtualDub/Windows/Mac codec issues: we ended up creating IFF image sequences of the shots) but the results were absolutely amazing.
Spend some time learning the advanced interface, and you'll get results you wouldn't believe possible.
