Tips on killing noise

Noel Evans

Noel Evans

Mod V3 New and Improved
Staff member
Hey all, I recently shot a bands live performance and yadda yadda the reasons are in another thread.... but now I need to get this edited.

Basically at the end of the day my images are underexposed, which in turn when using the dvx = a fair bit of noise. Can someone offer any tips on noise reduction.....

Any advise greatly appreciated.

Noel
 
The problem with noise is that it is random in nature. Its appearance is rather indeterminable and uncorrelated. This being the case, there isn't much that can be done to separate it from the actual signal that you wanted to record. What you are basically suffering from is poor signal to noise ratio. There isn't a "magic bullet" (pun intended) filter that you can apply which will recover from a poorly lite shot and make it look like you had adequate light. If something like this existed, then it would be used by everyone instead of proper lighting, so much easier to "fix it in post" than do it right the first time. Mole, Arri and many others would soon be out of business.

Now, what is a better question is what can you do with your footage to make it more attractive and usable. There are a number of things that you can apply to your footage that might give you subjectively acceptable results. Since your subject is a band, you can probably take more liberties than if it was a cooporate interview.

What you might want to do is put a short clip on line which is representative of the footage that you have shot so that I and others can see what might be done to "help" your footage. I would suggest posting a short .avi of an unprocessed (no effects applied) segment. You could strip off the sound to make it a little smaller in size.
 
OK. Can any one tell me if editing uncompressed 4:2:2 10 bit is a problem with Premiere?
 
Thanks for the response khmuse. I contacted the organiser of this partilular gig, who was aware of the issues he had caused me, and was satisfied with a web only clip, which appeased the problem. They didnt supply me any audio input at all, so the sound was aweful, how can you record a full band with one mic?

Anyway I used the most interesting components of the gig into a clip cut to one backing track with a pre and post interview. It certainly isnt the greatest, but it seems to suit thier needs. I have pretty much told this organiser I wont submit anymore work where I am made to shoot under those conditions. It does you no good to hand over **** quality product I would rather refund and not submit anything.
 
Hello ncje,

Glad to learn that you came up with a workable solution. I fully agree, if the conditions won't lend themselves to a quality outcome, then why put yourself through the process.

As for recording a band with only a single mic, depending upon the type of band, there is a highly specialized mic that can do an admirable job. It is the Soundfiled which is a X-Y-Z plus W point source device that records true 3 dimensional space. The interesting aspect of this mic is that you can obtain an infinite number of individual outputs from an infinite number of virtual directions, all post recording (assuming that you capture the 4 signals).
 
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