I'm trying to clean up some analog video that has some noise in it. Do any of you have a favorite way of doing this in vegas? Thanks for the replies.

Unfortunately, Vegas is not the tool to use for removing noise. There are two ways of doing it, spatial denoising, which is essentially applying a blur filter to each frame of the video. The second method is temporal noise reduction, where it compares a number of frames in a row to see what is random noise and what is actual program material. It then smooths out the changes between frames. Applied conservatively, this work quite well. Then there are some filters which are a combination of both.

If you're not aware of it, there is a freeware video processing tool called "VirtualDub" and many people have written both spatial and temporal noise reduction plugins for it. Here is a link to the VirtualDub website where you can download the program and find links to various plugins;

www.virtualdub.org

In addition to VirtualDub, you will need an external DV codec because the DV codec in Vegas is only available from within Vegas itself. Panasonic has a free DV codec. Google it.

John

Thanks John for the reply, I just learned about this little program from another thread. I have downloaded it and I am trying to learn how to use it. ( Know of any good tutorial?) Have you used this program for noise reduction. If so what plug-in(s) do you like to use and where can I find it.

Paul,

Yes, I use VirtualDub for a bunch of different things and noise reduction is certainly one of them. I'm aware of perhaps a dozen noise reduction plugins, but my favorite is one called "Temporal Cleaner Beta 0.5" by Jim Casaburi. You can get it here:

http://home.earthlink.net/~casaburi/download/

Donald Graft has written a bunch of great VD plugins as well, here's a link to his site:

http://neuron2.net/

Be sure to check out the "Mine", "Hosted", " Other", and "A/V Links" on his site. Hope this helps.

John

also checkout a site called vcdhelp.com

offers LOADS of tutorials

by the way, ther was a post here of some colour correction plugins being made.. and apparently the same dude is wokring on a plugin shell for Vegas which allows u to use VDub plugs within vegas.. should be good :)

John and Peter, Thank you for sharing your knowledge about this program. I did get to play around a little bit with the program last night. Very cool for free. I think this will do what I am looking for to clean up the analog video. I also did a little reading about frame server. Seem this little program brings new meaning to the phrase, Looks are deceiving:-)

A simple way to reduce the noise in Vegas is to duplicate the video track (copy the video and paste into another track) and delay one video track by one frame. Then give the upper track 50% transparency. Works quite well with random noise.

I'll try it. Thanks

You may also want to look at this thread:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=218869&Replies=50&Page=0

the recapture idea is very very nice! Never thought of! Thank you very much for the link!

"some dude" happens to be Satish Kumar who has a website here:
http://www.debugmode.com/

his frameserver plugin will allow you to access either VirtualDub or Avisynth from within vegas. You can also use his WAX splugin to access VDub plugins from within vegas.

Thanks for the GREAT link Edward. Good reading!

Satish's WAX plugin is amazing, however, because of the limitations of Vegas it will not allow you to run any Virtual Dub plugins that require processing across multiple frames simultaneously. This would include any of VirtualDub's temporal noise reduction plugins. Sorry.

John

Bummer!!