One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

Did a search here before posting this to try and not double up on an older thread.

Nothing showed so I thought I'd pass this along.

I love my EX3 but it suffers under low light. I bump up the gain and, of course, the expected grainy video is the result. There are some pretty expensive solutions available but I found this one which, in my case, was more affordable but by no means free.

Neat Video - best noise reduction for digital video

It's a hundred dollar download filter which has worked wonders with my own video.

Images which were full of grain become amazingly better.

I'd researched some other programs and the price quickly climbed to, in some cases, a thousand dollars. Of course the more expensive programs did many other things besides removing grain from video.

This plug in has one purpose. Take out the grain and make the image much better.

I edit on Final Cut Pro 7 but it's offered for other systems as well.

Did I make a mistake spending a hundred bucks? Was there something cheaper I wasn't aware of?

A friend of mine who also shoots an EX3 and edits on FCP7 pointed me in the direction of this plugin so I figured I'd do the same here. ;)

I hope this post doesn't cross any lines. Not trying to market something. Please delete and let me know not to do it again if I've broken a rule here.

John

Re: One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

John,

You definitely did not go wrong with Neatvideo. I've been using it on my EX3 footage as well as footage shot on a variety of other cameras and it does a great job of getting rid of noise while keeping the IQ up.

The only downside is that it takes a long time to go through it's process. But for footage that needs cleaning up I usually run NeatVideo while converting to Cineform AVI's.

Re: One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

You are right Garrett about the long render time for a lot of video.

Very glad to hear someone else has had a positive experience with the plugin.

I had a wedding ceremony shot just after the sun went down and very low ambient light.

Not pitch black but I was freaking out at how much gain I had to use to capture an image.

Out of the entire 24 minute final product, I had about ten minutes of grainy video and it took a couple of hours to render it.

I don't render the raw. Just the shots in the final product.

Still...the long render time, for me, was worth it to have the better image at the end.

I'll take that render time over handing a client video which I am not proud of. ;)

Re: One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

Using NeatVideo for my low light EX1 footage. Using it in FCPX. It's well worth the long wait on renders.

Re: One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

It's excellent. Was wondering what the fastest rendering anyone has seen. . . better than 1 frame per second?

Re: One solution for grainy, low light EX3 video
 

I get about 20 fps with neat video 3 and gtx570 gpu in premiere cs5.5.