I used a Canon XH-A1 in a documentary situation where I had little or no control over lighting. Some of the footage has turned out very grainy (i.e. video noise), especially in low-light situations. It's a grain that looks a bit like old TV static. The worst of this footage looks almost unusable. To make things worse, I am compressing the HDV to SD for a DVD. Once I do this, the grain/static becomes VERY pronounced, and these particular shots look awful.
I'm wondering two things: first, is there a good static/noise/grain removal utility? I've used the FCP, and the Nattress Temporal and Spatial smoothers within FCP, and they seem to have little desirable effect. Is there something else out there that will help?
Second, is there a codec or utility that will compress the video for DVD without making the static worse? I'm less concerned about color information etc. than I am about this static.
Here is my workflow, if it will help:
- capture the footage onto my G-raid using FCP
- edit, then correct in Color on a calibrated monitor... with the low-light footage I find that by pulling down the black levels I can tone down the static a little (it basically gets swallowed up in the shadows).
- output as uncompressed files, reconnect each of them in FCP.
- send to Compressor straight from FCP, using the best DVD settings (the "Best Quality 90 Minutes" preset - 6.2 mbps - is there a better way to do this?). I've also tried outputting a Quicktime movie, then importing that to Compressor, with little difference.
Invariably the end product comes out looking pretty bad. I'm not exactly an expert on HDV: I'm hoping there is a way to downsize it to SD without losing so much quality (when I downsize stills they actually look better than a grainy original). And of course if I could clean up the graininess in the first place I'd be a lot better off.
I would very much appreciate any help or advice anyone can offer; the more information the better.
Re: Video noise from the Canon XH-A1. Help! by Jeremy Garchow on Jun 12, 2008 at 8:46:44 pm
[Godfrey Gudeski]"I'm wondering two things: first, is there a good static/noise/grain removal utility? I've used the FCP, and the Nattress Temporal and Spatial smoothers within FCP, and they seem to have little desirable effect. Is there something else out there that will help? "
