General Neat Video Best Denoiser for ML RAW

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dlwatson

Member
Hey folks, just wanted to give you a quick look at the differences when using Neat Video on your Canon Magic Lantern RAW footage. It's a great and powerful noise reduction plugin and in my experience works much better cleaning and preserving details in the shadows than denoiser.


And if you don't use RAW, it's also a fantastic plugin for just standard H.264 footage as well.
 
Neat's pretty popular around here.

if you want to get the most out of it, take an afternoon and shoot a dark-ish, solid card at each ISO. Use those to do your noise tuning in Neat Video and save them as presets.

It can be very hard to find a good-sized square of uniform color when using Neat. Build a library of noise profiles and you'll get your tuning up in the high 80's vs. the "47%" you have to settle for often.
 
Michael Carter said:
if you want to get the most out of it, take an afternoon and shoot a dark-ish, solid card at each ISO.
Click to expand...

Michael, at what level would one expose such a card? Should it be lit – or is ambient lighting best? Perhaps we should do a preset for Tungsten as well as Daylight? Thanks.
 
Michael Carter said:
Neat's pretty popular around here.

if you want to get the most out of it, take an afternoon and shoot a dark-ish, solid card at each ISO. Use those to do your noise tuning in Neat Video and save them as presets.

It can be very hard to find a good-sized square of uniform color when using Neat. Build a library of noise profiles and you'll get your tuning up in the high 80's vs. the "47%" you have to settle for often.
Click to expand...

That's a great idea. Thanks for the suggestion!

Nate Haustein said:
Michael, at what level would one expose such a card? Should it be lit – or is ambient lighting best? Perhaps we should do a preset for Tungsten as well as Daylight? Thanks.
Click to expand...

That is a good point. I wonder if it would make a significant difference for having a present for each white balance.
 
I've worked from the assumption that a camera's noise character is the same across white balances. Tungsten setting amplifies the blue channel, so indeed it may be worthwhile (I've shot only daylight sources for the last few months, though). But the amount of noise on a given sensor will differ based on ISO or gain (video camera) settings so I try to get a library of what a camera may do. But yes, I'd assume the character of noise may change based on WB settings, with more noise in one channel than at daylight.

Since noise is most prevalent in shadows, I tend to expose a card (or even a flat wall) fairly low. Not dead black but maybe the bottom third of a WFM or left-of-cneter on a histogram. You can also shoot a few seconds and adjust the iris a couple times, scroll through that and see what level Neat gives you the highest tuning number with.

I've kinda gotten into the habit of shooting out-of-focus wall, ceiling, etc. at shoots with odd lighting or weird color mixes, just to have it handy during an edit. Sort of like room-tone is for audio, I try to catch the noise structure for video cleanup. Between that and presets I can get very high numbers when tuning NV.

Their sharpening is pretty nice too, when you don't overdo it.
 
Michael Carter said:
Neat's pretty popular around here.

if you want to get the most out of it, take an afternoon and shoot a dark-ish, solid card at each ISO. Use those to do your noise tuning in Neat Video and save them as presets.

It can be very hard to find a good-sized square of uniform color when using Neat. Build a library of noise profiles and you'll get your tuning up in the high 80's vs. the "47%" you have to settle for often.
Click to expand...

very to new to all of this can you explain to me what you mean with the cards? I'm a little slow sorry :(
 
(I don't have NV open in front of me - this is from memory, though I use it every week, sometimes every day)...

When you add neat Video (at least in After effects) there's few controls until you click "options". Then there are two sections: noise tuning and noise reduction/sharpening.

Neat video wants to "understand" the grain in a shot to remove it effectively. You can just hit "auto fine tune". There's a percentage readout, and you want it as high as possible. if you just click "auto fine tune", you can get lucky to hit 40%.

To get higher numbers, you draw a box in the profile section for the software to analyze and click "auto profile". The box has to be uniform - no detail, just a flat space with no gradients or details - not a common thing in actual footage. Not uniform and you'll get an "area not uniform" message. It can't be blown out on any channel (so even greenscreen footage won't work). If you get lucky, there may be a tiny swatch of wall or something... and neat will say (essentially) "I'd really like a bigger chunk please, profile anyway?". That's where using a card or out of focus wall comes in. And noise is more apparent in mids and shadows, so something with some meat to it exposure-wise... not a white card. that will get you in the 80's to 90's. Then, you can click "Auto fine-tune" and you may get a little higher, especially if your sample box was too small.

When you get a good high number, you might want to click the "save profile" button and save it for future reference - since the noise structure of your camera should be the same regardless of content. But not regardless of ISO/Gain and most likely white balance.

So, hopefully over time (or after an afternoon of profiling noise) you'll have a library of profiles like "CanonMkIII ISO 800 daylight", "AC-130 mediumgain tungsten", etc. You can simply call these up and get very high noise analysis. Then you jump over to "noise filter settings" and dial in noise reduction... and post-sharpening, which can bring a little sparkle back. You can zoom in to check the effect, and adjust exposure to really open up shadows (just for viewing, it doesn't affect the output).

Probably one of the best-value plugins out there by far - it's a steal for what it does.

Remember though - NV's rendering times are pretty good for what it does, but they are slow. In AE, neat turns off any other effects on that layer (but you can stick an adjustment layer over it). It's really best practice for jobs with several shots to just pre-render clips with neat and then go to town. If you're really gonna push the color/exposure around, consider an adjustment layer to preview how that style works with NV, and turn it off before prerendering. Go have a cup of coffee or a camel and come back to a regular-speed workflow.

EDIT: if you're expecting footage to edit/grade/effect that you didn't shoot and are concerned about noise (say someone's DIY horror shoot with no budget for lights shot at 1600), ask them to shoot a gray card with each setup. Tell them put it close to the lens and not worry about re-focusing (as you might for a slate). You'll be glad you did!
 
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