Ex1 noise!

Chadfish

Chadfish

Veteran
Hi

I've already posted this in the software section, but I need a quick answer from my EX1 homeboys. I shot some low light footage last night and with both 6db, and 9 db of gain, and Mark's NightPP I got some very noisy footage. I probably could have gotten away with 0db gain and the nightPP, but it looked so dark in my viewfinder. Anyway I'm trying to save the footage so I don't have to go shoot again in a restaurant and disturb people eating.

Are there any great noise reduction tools out there?

I found "Neat Video" for 99.00 http://www.neatvideo.com/

Update: I just bought it. Here's some testing I did...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sevXy8SbE4g
 
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Neat Video is an amazing tool but could be slow depending on your system. I have an i7 920 with 12gb RAM and it usually takes 2-3x the length of the project.
 
I've used several. Neat video is a good, and simple solution. I prefer the tools available in VirtualDub but that's just my own quirk I guess.
 
Basspig has a Picture Profile for night use. It extends the range in the blacks. It's somewhere on his site - possibly in the PP thread here. I have never tried it before, but when I was in the restaurant I had the Doug Jensen/Vortex Media standard-all around PP loaded, and I switched to BassPig's, and I saw the image get brighter, but not bright enough (so I thought) so I shot using 6db, and 9db of gain. When I played the footage back on my 46" it looked like noisy crap. I'm not saying it was Mark's PP. But since I was working I couldn't do A/B tests to run down the issue as to whether his PP ads grain, or if it was simply my overuse of gain. Probably the latter. Looking at the footage I could have used less gain, and captured more of the mood of the restaurant. What I got was brighter than the actual lighting in the place.

I can't trust my viewfinder! It's got the backlight up all the way, and always looks darker than what gets recorded. And grain is hard to see on that little screen. So I have to just shoot darker and trust... I don't like that.

Anyway I just bought Neat Video for 99.00, and hopefully it will fix the prob. Already slapping a little MB Looks on there masks the noise somewhat, so I think with the noise reduction I'll be good to go. Also I'm delivering NTSC with my 720p 16x9 letterboxed within, so it will be much smaller in use than the full rez on my HDTV.
 
thanks, i'll search for Mark's Night PP unless someone can post it here or PM me with it. maybe you could show us before and after versions when you're done.
 
I didn't shoot any "before" stuff with the normal PP. I'll have to find a way to do some tests and post that.
 
It looks like I'll have to wait a few days to upload to Vimeo, as I only have 83mb left for now. I'll put something on youtube, but the grain is harder to see the worse the compression is...
 
Michael B. McGee said:
as far as i could tell it looked like Neat Video did its job. how did you like the results?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty happy with the results. I'll have my Vimeo video up in a short while, where you can see it more clearly. In this test I pretty much just took a noise sample and applied it to the clip. There are more adjustments you can do to fine tune, but I was in a hurry and didn't. Also I had some strong grain going in the last clips, and throwing on color correction and MBLooks can enhance the grain with some settings. NV did OK considering I was getting a little extreme. I will say that the Neat Video software paid for itself (99.00) because it saved me from having to re-shoot all my footage for the restaurant shoot. And I'm positive in the normal situations where I get a little grain the NV plug-in will totally remove it. I'm glad to have it in my arsenal now.

I'm also going to try out that Philip Bloom PP a couple of posts back and see how that does. Maybe I'll make another video for that.
 
Facinating video demo, Chad. Oh, and I feel so honored to have one of my PP's chosen! :)

Something I noticed about EX gamma curves is that they work like adjusting the lightness component of a LAB color image in PhotoShop.. increasing the curve leaves behind the saturation--they don't track. And increasing the Low Key Saturation doesn't seem to track well either.
 
basspig said:
Facinating video demo, Chad. Oh, and I feel so honored to have one of my PP's chosen! :)

Something I noticed about EX gamma curves is that they work like adjusting the lightness component of a LAB color image in PhotoShop.. increasing the curve leaves behind the saturation--they don't track. And increasing the Low Key Saturation doesn't seem to track well either.
Click to expand...


You're talking over my head Mark!
 
In Photoshop, there are different "modes" for a bitmapped color image. The most common is RGB, but there is CMYK for press/print work, and LAB for photographic work. I often work in LAB color because I can tweak only the luma channel without affecting the color information. LAB has a Lightness, plus an A and a B channel, containing the two color dyes used in photographic film processing and is the closest to human visual perception. The A and B components represent red/magenta and green and blue and yellow.

The tracking problem in the EX cameras is that the thresholds for the "low chroma sat" control don't match up with the black gamma range. Boosting the black gamma results in loss of saturation in the shadows. Boosting the low chroma saturation doesn't boost the shadows close to black, but it boosts the saturation of areas somewhat brighter than shadows, but less than midtone brightness. So in looking at a yellow wall that is illuminated from dark shadow to mid brightness, we see an effect going from almost grey tone in the shadow, to hyper-saturated in the area brighter than that, to normal saturation when we get to even more illuminated wall, based on a gradual increase in illumination across the wall. It results in a banding effect where one region has unnaturally high saturation, next to a region that is almost monochrome. Better overlap of low chroma sat and black gamma might improve this situation.
 
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