C100: Cleaning up the noise with Neat video?

C

Conan Coatsworth

Member
Hey guys, i shot a lot of this (everything ringside) at F8 and 6400 iso and I cleaned a lot of it up with Neat in FCPX but there is still quite a lot of noise on that first dark corridor scene.

I wasn't sure if anyone had any knowledge of the Neat programme that would help clean it up a bit more?

Oh before anyone comments, I can't grade to save my life.

Cheers guys.

http://vimeo.com/91294366
 
Honestly, let it go. Had you not even mentioned noise and just posted the link we all would say "nice work". You're shooting at 6400 ISO at F8. Be happy you have a camera capable of that. The grade looks fine. The piece is well done. Stop beating yourself up. Sit back on your monitor and watch your video. Stop pixel peeping and obsessing over noise from shots taken at 6400Iso at F8.

Nice work. Move onto the next project.
 
dustylense said:
Honestly, let it go. Had you not even mentioned noise and just posted the link we all would say "nice work". You're shooting at 6400 ISO at F8. Be happy you have a camera capable of that. The grade looks fine. The piece is well done. Stop beating yourself up. Sit back on your monitor and watch your video. Stop pixel peeping and obsessing over noise from shots taken at 6400Iso at F8.

Nice work. Move onto the next project.
Click to expand...


to go back to one of my hobbies. RDWHAHB (relax, dont worry have a homebrew) My gf is always on my case about me trying to perfect in such a way only I could notice. So hard but honestly people will be more focused on the content most of the time.
 
Looks totally fine. More than fine, it all looks great!

BECAUSE you mentioned it, that one shot might be a little low-contrast / low-saturation compared to the rest of the video, but noise seemed fine – it's an unstaged shot in the dark and people will accept that.
 
cms86 said:
I stopped the video on the hallway scene and saw none on fullscreen.
Click to expand...

Nah, I was skipping through it...found the shot OP was talking about. I would say that maybe adding some contrast would help but that low-light already is what it is I expect.
 
Yea...I see what you mean. It looks like absolute garbage. Wait...edit that...I'm full of s%&t.

Your fine. Footage looks great.

On a serious note...Neat Video is a fantastic plugin. I use it all the time and get very nice results out of it. Best $100 you'll ever spend.
 
@Dusty: Sound advice, esp your last line. Thanks

@Andrew @Justin @Nate: I might try a little more contrast and maybe some grain? Thanks chaps. I'll have a go.

@cms @Reel @Rz: Very positive words. Much appreciated. Thanks.

Question: (excuse my naivety) what is the difference between noise and macro blocking?
 
On that last point, noise generally means (in video image terms), a random speckling at the size of 1 pixel. It can be monochrome (which is at a point where it could become very fine 'film grain') or it can be colorised to a greater or lesser extent, which looks pretty bad.

Macroblocking covers the issues of lossy compression where the image is subdivided into square blocks, then each block is examined by the compressor to see how much detail is in there. Not much? Hey, it's one huge pixel. Lot's of detail? Right, now we subdivide it again, and then look at capturing all that detail. What happens is that in heavily compressed video (YouTube) shows big square blocks, sometimes whole areas with blocky outlines, in areas of subtle tone (walls with a little bit of light from one side, blue skies - awfully tricky for cameras to do, still water (because it's mostly reflected sky) and so on.

I got obsessed (OBSESSED) with noise in the C100 image whilst trying to use a delicately shaded background. Note that if you use too much denoising, the image gets plastic and unrealistic, and then you have problems with macroblocking in the web compression. To counter that, you then add GRAIN (not noise) to give the compression engine something to chew on. Too much grain and you hurt the compression. Not enough, and you get macroblocking.

Way back when, in the early days of computer graphics, there was a system known as 'Diffusion Dither' to get more lifelike imagery out of a limited palette of 256 colours. I'm pretty sure that the 8 bit nature of the C100 is relying a little bit on this diffusion dither trick to get its nice pictures. However, there's also the spectre of 'standing noise' - sometimes we see streaky lines in the viewfinder, or on our edit screen. Sometimes this is more to do with a slight mismatch between the image resolution and the display resolution - it goes away when you view at 1:1. But sometimes it's there - maybe only you can see it - and hence Canon suggest that we Auto Black Balance when we change Gain/ISO so the camera has a chance to see what the static noise looks like, and removes that from the AVCHD recording.
 
Sorry forgot what you're thread was about after I started watching... interesting little piece.
 
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