Hi Roger, I didn't want to divert the thread but here is an explanation. When you take a shot from an airplane you are mostly getting a picture of the haze and not the scene you really want. Fortunately haze is in a pretty narrow brightness band, sort of the definition of a highlight, so you can use the shadow/highlight filter to reduce the highlight (haze). I've been using this for still aerials ever since Photoshop introduced the filter. It's really almost impossible to get the same good effect with glass filters or with curves or other Photoshop/Premiere filters. (Which is why I asked if there was an equivalent Vegas filter.)

I've attached a frame from a clip of the central California coast where the right side of the frame is as shot and the left is using the shadow/highlight filter in CS4. Hope this shows the overall effect. I'm shooting with a Canon 5D MkII.

Charles,

I played with Vegas a bit and think I have a decent response. Please give me a little grace as the picture you posted was highly processed and downsized and I just copied the posted image and processed it further. I roughly matched the right side using Vegas Pro 8 to the left side you processed using Premiere. I am supplying two photo's with 2 levels of processing:

The rights side of Photo 1 uses Vegas Pro 8 with the "Levels" plug-in (standard) with the following settings:
All channels
Input start 0.258
Input end 0.897
Output start 0.013
Output end 1.000
Gamma 1.000

The right side of Photo 2 uses Vegas Pro 8 + "Level" plug-in described above + Neat Video's noise suppression plug-in ($99). IMO Neat did a nice job cleaning up the artifacts present in your posted image. The Premiere and Vegas renderings as tested have some subtle distinctions in how they handle the water, clouds, mountain detail, and the skyline behind the mountains. Perhaps both could achieve identical results given time?

How do you feel about the comparison?

Thanks Roger. If I had known you would do that much I'd have worked for a higher quality clip! Yes, levels is very useful and it looks like Vegas has a good implementation; for some aerial photos levels is all that's needed. And thanks for the report on the Neat Video plugin, that was going to be my next question on the forum, how well does the plugin work for this kind of codec artifacts - and you answered it nicely.

Charles,

Here's another post I did on Neat a few days ago. I'm very impressed and am amazed how it has helped me recover footage I thought was lost and make good footage look even better. Well worth the $99.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/what-happ...ion-vegas.html

I've even had good results cleaning up point-and-shoot PowerShot movies (Canon A620/S3) footage to make it look better than it ought to look. Great for web posting small files.

I have CS4 in the mail now and was planning on using Neoscene. Is there another software converter I can use in the mean time?

EDIT: I sent an e-mail to Cineform and they answered back saying they know of no bugs concerning playability of Neoscene in CS4.