HELP!! Noise in Footage

Larry Rutledge

Larry Rutledge

Fest Master
I was going through the footage of my recently shot short film and found that all the night exteriors have some weird noise in them. I'm hoping someone might be able to help me make these look better:

(Click on the image for the full frame res):








Thanks for any help!!
 
Larry,

I noticed in a bts pic that it was shot with the XL-H1. This looks like either the auto-gain was used or the gain was bumped up to a very high level. I don't know about noise reduction filters in Vegas, but I think there are some decent options for AE, etc.

The problem with NR filtering is it will soften your footage, but if you're downrezzing from HDV 24f, that might be ok.

Somebody really messed up with the camera. You shouldn't get noise like that unless someone was trying to compensate for a waaay underlit shot and just bumped the gain too high. That looks like +12 or +18db gain.
 
Tried the free demo of Neat Video ... not perfect, but does a rather impressive job. Unfortunately, the version that will work on full res HDV (1440x1080) footage, such as we have for our project, is $100 ... that's $100 we don't have unfortunately.

Guess we'll have to live with the noise and hope we can one day re-shoot the footage. It's really a shame because all the night exterior stuff was shot with a professional actor, David Fine ... and it will cost to bring him out again.

Not to mention the disappointment of telling him that his footage didn't come out
 
Come on Larry, you must know someone with after effects, it will make the footage much better.
 
There are lots of denoisers out there. Neatvideo is merely one. I use MSU Denoiser's plug in for Virtualdub and it works quite well. There are 4-5 other free ones out there that do a decent job as well.

compression.ru/video/denoising/msu_denoising.pdf

Download that PDF. It's a bit heady, but gives some good comparisons on what is out there and how (well) they work.
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "weird" noise. The noise in the frame grabs you posted sure looks typical for shooting with gain up.

The MSU Denoising filter can work well. It's temporal filtering can be very effective in non motion areas of the image, without causing horrible trailing artifacts in areas with motion, even at fairly aggressive settings.

http://compression.ru/video/denoising/index_en.html
 
pmark23 said:
Check out Mike Crash's "Dynamic Noise Reduction" plugin. It's based on the VirtualDub plugin, is free, and works great (doesn't blur the image).
Click to expand...

Exactly! If you have no budget, then get VirtualDub and the Dynamic Noise Reduction filter (FREE) or Mike Crash's Dynamic Noise Reduction plugin. Both are free and will make what you have better.

~jr
 
Well, what I meant by "weird noise" was, I didn't know what was causing it. Not having had a lot of experience yet I couldn't look at it and know it was from gain ... I do now. At the point of writing that, I didn't know what was the cause and was desperate for help in doing something about it.

Fortunately, someone pointed out the "Remove Grain" effect in After Effects and I used that to improve the overall clarity.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll definitely check them out for future reference.
 
It's to bad. The HD version of Neat Video really works well when you learn how to tweak it.

It's quite amazing.
 
I agree. Neat Video does amazing work. It actually improves image quality even if you don't need the tweaks if you know how.
 
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