Playing For Pocket Change

[markinhifi]

Hey guys. Here's something I just shot recently. Playing For Pocket Change is a mini series featuring musicians playing on the streets and in the subways of New York City. Often overlooked and ignored, we find out who these people are and what makes them want play in the world's strangest venue.

Here's a question I have, actually. I shot in low light with a fairly slow lens so there was a lot of noise. I used Neat Video to clean it up and it left the video looking a little strange. Not blurry, but "blendy" I think is a good made up word for it. Watch it and you'll see what I mean.. Are there any better FCP plugins besides Neat Video that won't leave me with the footage looking like this? Or is that just the nature of the way noise removal works?


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[kwoff]

That "plasticy" look usually results from applying too much noise reduction. Did you tweak the settings to get a look you like? I find that I almost always need to make some changes after Neat Video generates a profile in order to fine tune the image. As to whether there are other, better FCP noise reduction plug-ins, I think you will find from threads on this site that Neat Video is among the best. I have found it very good, even on low light footage that I made as noisy as possible to test the plug-in.

Kevin

 

[markinhifi]

Thanks for the reply, Kevin. I was in quite a rush to get it done and didn't really play around with the settings too much, but I did try a little bit. I think just the amount of noise was quite distracting I tried to get rid of every last trace of it. I think i'm going to try to go back and redo it and see if I can come up with a good compromise.