OK. Banding noise on the GH1/ GH13. You have probably read the multitude of threads on it if it bothers you. You may have tried some voodoo witchcraft stuff like leaving your camera turned on for 2 weeks whilst sprinkling chicken blood on it... you might even think it helped.
Back in the real world - what can you do?
I find I get a lot less banding now with careful shooting as it really is a problem in low light and low detail / contrast shots. Occasionally though I just can't shoot my home movies in good enough light. The pancake lens is cool - but it isn't fast enough sometimes.
I have recently been able to use some shots that would previously have been rendered inoperable with neat video - I am keen to see how other people are finding it?
Unfortunately it is really designed to take away FPN - which it seems to do very well. Banding is a special case however and my overall impression is that you CAN't get rid of it completely.
Anyway - I shelled out for neat video and have spent a lot of time looking through various settings in its advanced mode. I have also found a guy at neat video called Vlad to be super helpful - it looks like he is looking into this particular type of noise and who knows - might come up with something in the future?
http://www.neatvideo.com/nvforum/viewtopic.php?t=563&sid=8668910982d5e65bdf28e4e155951d44
There are a lot of options - but what I have found working is... first keep your temporal filter radius at 1. Increasing this usually increases quality at the expense of render time. I was happy to do that - but in fact for banding noise it makes things worse if you crank it up.
Next tip.... some clips work great with the default area selection tool to build a noise profile - but what about clips that don't have a big uniform space? The secret here was to develop some device noise profiles based on pre-existing vids.
Basically i videoed a blank wall in poor light and had a whole frame full of banding. I then analysed this and saved the resulting profile as my GH1 preset. I could then load this in any videos I had regardless of how short / cluttered they were.
Next you need to develop a preset that works well for banding.
I tried mucking about with all the channels - the only things that really helped me personally were upping all the noise reduction amounts to 100%. Then slightly adjusting the noise thresholds (these are the bits that lose image detail if you go too high.)
The best result I could find was upping hight to 35%, mid to 20% and low at 15%.
High quality and resolution boxes ticked. Nil else.
I find the resulting images to be ok without extra sharpening - though pixel peepers may differ!
Not perfect by a long shot - lets hope Vlad and team get this looked at - but in the meantime I think it is money well spent to reduce the banding in some of your shots. The best advice of course is to avoid the banding in the first place.
Below is a really quick test vid.... the first half is sans neat video - the 2nd is with it applied. This was a case were you could not select a large enough area to do a tailored noise profile so I used my preset.
Any other tips / advice re neat video for GH1 welcomed. Also - if anyone wants my noise profile or preset I can let you have them as a downloadable file - though it is easy to set them up yourself.
Back in the real world - what can you do?
I find I get a lot less banding now with careful shooting as it really is a problem in low light and low detail / contrast shots. Occasionally though I just can't shoot my home movies in good enough light. The pancake lens is cool - but it isn't fast enough sometimes.
I have recently been able to use some shots that would previously have been rendered inoperable with neat video - I am keen to see how other people are finding it?
Unfortunately it is really designed to take away FPN - which it seems to do very well. Banding is a special case however and my overall impression is that you CAN't get rid of it completely.
Anyway - I shelled out for neat video and have spent a lot of time looking through various settings in its advanced mode. I have also found a guy at neat video called Vlad to be super helpful - it looks like he is looking into this particular type of noise and who knows - might come up with something in the future?
http://www.neatvideo.com/nvforum/viewtopic.php?t=563&sid=8668910982d5e65bdf28e4e155951d44
There are a lot of options - but what I have found working is... first keep your temporal filter radius at 1. Increasing this usually increases quality at the expense of render time. I was happy to do that - but in fact for banding noise it makes things worse if you crank it up.
Next tip.... some clips work great with the default area selection tool to build a noise profile - but what about clips that don't have a big uniform space? The secret here was to develop some device noise profiles based on pre-existing vids.
Basically i videoed a blank wall in poor light and had a whole frame full of banding. I then analysed this and saved the resulting profile as my GH1 preset. I could then load this in any videos I had regardless of how short / cluttered they were.
Next you need to develop a preset that works well for banding.
I tried mucking about with all the channels - the only things that really helped me personally were upping all the noise reduction amounts to 100%. Then slightly adjusting the noise thresholds (these are the bits that lose image detail if you go too high.)
The best result I could find was upping hight to 35%, mid to 20% and low at 15%.
High quality and resolution boxes ticked. Nil else.
I find the resulting images to be ok without extra sharpening - though pixel peepers may differ!
Not perfect by a long shot - lets hope Vlad and team get this looked at - but in the meantime I think it is money well spent to reduce the banding in some of your shots. The best advice of course is to avoid the banding in the first place.
Below is a really quick test vid.... the first half is sans neat video - the 2nd is with it applied. This was a case were you could not select a large enough area to do a tailored noise profile so I used my preset.
Any other tips / advice re neat video for GH1 welcomed. Also - if anyone wants my noise profile or preset I can let you have them as a downloadable file - though it is easy to set them up yourself.
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