Video Noise Reduction
 

What are the recommended techniques for removing video noise.

I have some footage that I wish to salvage. This was recorded by another person using an XL1s with a very high gain setting resulting in a very marginal picture and a lot of video noise.

I am intersted in various techniques that others have used.

Thank you for your assistance.

You might want to look at the "Dynamic Noise Reduction" plugin found here: http://mikecrash.wz.cz/

If you don't mind drastically change the look of your footage, try diffusion effects.

i.e.
duplicate video onto itself, or nest it on top of itself.
to the top layer (or track), apply gaussian blur and set blending mode to hard light or overlay.

2- Dynamic noise reduction is also a good way to reduce noise. Watch out for motion artifacts... it looks like a trailing effect.

Spatial noise reduction (smart smoother kind of does this) also can reduce noise. Downside is loss of low/subtle detail.

A combination would also work I think... I've been experimenting with Noise Ninja (Photoshop plug-in, using Photoshop batch actions), Mike's deinterlace filter for its motion map (to use as a mask), and his dynamic NR plugin.

3- In AE6.5, the latest version, it has grain surgery which is very good and similar to what I describe above.

Dear Glenn and Edward,

Thank you for the suggestions.

I have been using Mike Crash's Dynamic Noise Reduction, testing various settings. The problem I have is that I have some very noisy video due to the cameraman's error.

Glenn, I will try your suggestions. Thanks for your help.

grain reduction plugin--Neat Video
 

This is an old thread, but not an old topic.

Just tried Neat Video as a plug-in for 7.0e to see what effect it might have on removing low light camera gain noise. I liked the results so much I bought the plug-in, through away five burned DVD's and rerendered the files using the plug-in. And that was on clips already heavily massaged with Gaussian Blur and Mike Crash's Smart Smoother.

The company's been around awhile, having started in the still image business with Neat Image. The plug-in operates like Sound Forge's Noise Reduction--find a quiet segment where only the noise exists, sample the noise, remove the noise. In this case, whether automatically or manually, find an area of the shot that lacks detail, allowing only the grain print to be sampled, then remove that grain from the clip.

Rendering is pretty time consuming, but it dramatically improved the footage. It's a faily deep tool, with plenty of controls for fine tuning, and a solid manual.

If you're wrestling with low light footage or other similar uniform video noise, check it out.

Thanks a bunch for that information, Scott. I've had a hunch that something like this was possible and would be a huge benefit to everyone. With HDV carrying the price of reduced low-light performance, this sort of plugin could be a huge benefit. I actually bought the V1 assuming something like this would be possible. Other than the noise itself, I like the fact that the V1 retains nice color in low light unlike CCD cameras I've owned. If I can use 1/30 shutter at 30P and 15db of gain then fix it with noise reduction, the V1 could turn into a great event video camera. If their example videos and your review are a true indication of it's effectiveness, somebody like Sony should throw a few million dollars at these guys and buy the technology.

I have a dual-core machine and with noise reduction, image stabilization, chromakey, and digital filters like blur - I already need a quadcore!