Adding noise to mix composited clips

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

I've been looking at using such tools as Blender, After Effects, and Premiere to allow me to do more compositing of live and 3-d modeled environments.

But one thing that seems to bother me, is that when I shoot live action, because of the type of cameras I have available to me, there is always some amount of noise/jitter at the pixel level, that would not match the 3-d modeled material.

So, the question is, what 'noise' filters do people use to make the composited images 'match' in terms of these subtle effects.

I have thought about 'fake' grain filters, but the ones I tried some time ago, when I was converting SD material up to HD size, in order to cover the uprezing artifacts, didn't seem to work all that well.

As a note, I'm also 'ok' with producing only monochrome, aka Black & White, output, so perhaps color issues would not be so apparent.

 

[Demistate]

Try this tutorial. It was created by a guy at Cinema5D. It produces great results, but looks terrible on low bitrate video streaming services like Vimeo and Youtube.

http://www.cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=8348

 

[PDR]

There are various "match grain" filters in AE and 3rd party plugins. AE comes with one (basically you sample the source you want to match, and apply to the other clean layer).

Furnace in Nuke has a decent grain matching filter called "ReGrain"

Another approach is to denoise the background plate (you might do this first , even if you were applying grain/noise filter)

 

[Croll]

In After Effects apply the 'Mosaic' effect to the layer (not your live footage)... zoom in until you can see the pixels of your layer AND footage. Now you just need to increase the Horizontal & Vertical block size till it matches your live footage.

You can then use 'Match Grain' effect to add some animation to the layers.

 

[pveal]

one of the liveliest, evolving threads on cinema5d (edit: referring to demistate's link )