Denoising Advice

kcw wrote on 2/20/2012, 2:15 PM
I am dealing with some footage shot in 1080i HDV that has a considerable amount of noise in it. I have tried Neat Video as a denoiser, which works well but takes forever, and the Mike Crash denoiser for 32 bit Vegas, which does not seem to work as well. Are there other plugins anyone can recommend - preferably for Vegas, but also for After Effects or VirtualDub, if need be, that will do a good job in a reasonable amount of time?

Also, is it beneficial to do some type of sharpening after the denoising, and if so, any recommendations as to the best program for that? It seemed that using the sharpening tool in Vegas added more noise back to the video when I tried it.

Comments

mvpvideos2007 wrote on 2/20/2012, 2:33 PM
Did you try adjusting contrast to delete some of the noise?
johnmeyer wrote on 2/20/2012, 2:39 PM
I've posted extensively about this subject. Here is a link to two threads that may help.

My Latest Denoising Tests (thanks Nick!)

How to Save/Improve Grainy Low-Light Footage?

Most of my work has been done with AVISynth. Some of these things can be translated to VirtualDub, although AVISynth allows more complex denoising and has better (and faster) plugins.

Put them above each other on two tracks in Vegas, match the project properties to the first clip, set the loop to play the events continuously, and then A/B between them.

In addition to my advice in these threads, you may find other people's advice helpful.

I have found that most of the native VirtualDub denoising filters tend to suffer from the same problems as Neat Video, a plugin that I've never liked, even though most people here in the forum like it a lot. IMHO most of these simple combo spatial/temporal filters tend to do too much damage to fine detail (that's the spatial part of the filter) and then leave too many artifacts in the video (that's usually caused by the temporal part of the filter).

Quite a few of the before/after samples are still downloadable from that first link above, so you can judge for yourself which approaches work best.

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, this was Nick's original PAL DV video:

Noisy Underwater PAL DV Fish Video

and this was my final "best" attempt at denoising it:




JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/20/2012, 6:46 PM
> "Are there other plugins anyone can recommend - preferably for Vegas, but also for After Effects or VirtualDub, if need be, that will do a good job in a reasonable amount of time?"

Try the BCC Noise Reduction plug-in from Boris Continuum Complete 7 for Vegas Pro. I just used it the other day for some footage I shot in low light and it cleaned it up really nicely. I have a tutorial on how to use it on Boris TV episode Save the Shot with Boris Continuum Complete and Sony Vegas Pro. Noise Reduction is the second half of the tutorial:



Here is an example of the footage I used it on. This is shot hand-held with my little Sony HDR-CX12 from the balcony of the Highligh Ballroom in NYC. That's original singer from the Cro-Mags, John Joseph, sitting in with the Westchester School of Rock kids.



I know you can't tell how noisy it was but trust me, it was pretty noisy and it's fairly clean now.

~jr