Removing grain

[Lynos]

Hi

One of the premier reasons I moved my footage to AE was to try and get rid of the grain. I have a very serious grain problem and I'm not kidding myself that it's ALL going to go away, but I still would like to reduce it as much as possible while not losing a lot of sharpness.

Anyway, I've been applying the Remove Grain effect to certain shots and it doesn't seem to do anything. I push the Channel Noise Reduction up, up, up, and it doesn't make any difference. The grain stays the same size. It's really frustrating.

I couldn't find any tutorial on this effect, and the AE help is very murky and unclear.
If anyone knows of a good tutorial for this or knows how to get the best results from this effect, I will be grateful.

Thanks.

[WesCoughlin]

I'm not sure if this helps since you already said you looked at the help files, but here you go anyways.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WSAE104790-DF54-4d29-84BC-91E9F2617773.html

[lhdor]

You may simply have to play with the levels, crushing the blacks, and other color correction, then apply the Remove Grain Effect.

[Larry Rutledge]

Not sure what kind of grain you have in your footage, but I recently had a grain issue that I had to deal with. You can read about it here:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=128609&page=4

To remove, I used Matt's technique. I dropped the "Remove Grain" effect on my footage then set the "Noise Reduction Level" setting to "1.8" and then set the "Preview Region" to "Final Output".

It wasn't perfect, but it sure made a huge difference for me. Hope that helps

[Lynos]

Thanks, all. I'm going to try your suggestions. I applied the effect and couldn't see a huge difference. I also wasn't sure if I should apply it before the color correction or afterwards. I have a whole sequence with such bad grain i'm beginning to think I'll have to cut it out of the film. It's that bad.

At the end of the day I'll have to accept the grain as part of the footage, I guess...

[Larry Rutledge]

Try it before the color correction, make sure you set "Preview Region" to "Final Output" otherwise it seems to only affect the small square that it samples for determining the grain.

Then apply your color correction. I was fortunate in that all my grainy footage was at night, so I could really crush the blacks to help flatten the remaining grain/noise into the background. Then I slapped an aggreesive color grading over the top to help disguise it.

Good luck

[Lynos]

Why exactly 1.8 and not go higher, for example, to 4,000? And have you done any fine tuning?

[dory_breaux]

something you might try with Mattys technique is to ramp the contrast up really high before you add the noise reduction filter, and then ramp it down after the filter. Two separate brightness/contrast effects with the reduce noise in between them. Never tried it but theretocially it should give the noise removal effect more to work with.

[Larry Rutledge]

I used 1.8 because it was the best compromise for me between removing the grain and softening the image. If I bumped it up it didn't seem to improve the removal while it did increase image softness and caused an unwanted glow.

You have to adjust it for your footage and determine what acceptable to you. I did play with the other settings but they didn't seem to offer much in the way of improvement so I settled on the two adjustments I mention above

[Lynos]

Ok, thanks.

Yeah, I find it very hard to see any significant change in the image either way. I think I actually expected the entire grain... well... to be removed. How silly of me.
Most of the shots that has the heaviest grain in them also suffer from not-so-great lighting (and are exterior shots), although we're not talking night scenes here.
I can make them look better using the color correction tools, but the grain remains a problem.