Louis,

My theory would be to keep the Apple; things are coming out all the time, and I wouldn't doubt there is something on the way. It may already be there, whether built into Apple or as a plug-in.

heath

If you want to test the plugin, drop me an email and I'll send it to you graeme@nattress.com I don't want you to buy it until I know if it does the stuff you need it to!

Graeme

Graeme,
I tried the chroma noise plugin briefly yesterday and got some really excellent results! I was able to get rid of most of the chroma noise in some pretty extreme examples. However I really don't know what I'm doing with the settings yet . I just used the "spacial chroma noise reduction" section of the plugin, with the "spacial chroma amount" set to 1 and the "chroma blur" set up high. I used the color focus and it's color picker to select the color I wanted to process from the canvas. I had the "select similar colours amount" set to 38. (is this selecting more range of colors with a higher setting or less?)
Also, should the "colour samplng" setting be set to "4.2.0 P" for the HD1OU footage?
Would you have a guide to all theses settings by any chance Graeme? or some sample settings that you'd recommend as a starting point?

What would be an incredibly useful addition would be if you could see in the canvas or viewer what color range you were focusing on, much as you can do with FCP's 3-way color corrector, where it will show you a black and white image where the white areas are those you have selected to act upon with the color corrector, this is probably asking for too much but it would be sooo useful.

From what I see so far, this is a wonderful plugin Graeme and I think it will take care of 90% of the color noise problems with this cameras footage, which is a huge boost. Of course you'll have to process it on a scene-by-scene basis to get the best results I would imagine.

Thank you very much for doing this.

Thanks Paul!

The plugin is still beta, and hence no instructions yet, but your feedback is appreciated.

Increaseing the "Select Similar Colours" selects a greater range of colours, and yes, I can display this on screen. I had it working this way in a diagnostic mode while developing it, so it should be easy to add it back in. 4:2:0 P would be right for the HDV, although at the moment, it's not doing anything different from 4:2:0 I, and indeed, I may not need to make them different due to the way that FCP works, thus there might just be a 4:2:0 setting in the future. The good thing is, that there is the "side effect" of having your chroma upsampled at the same time as it's getting noise reduced.

Graeme

David Newman was kind enough to give me a beta version of the chroma filter to test out and after having it for about an hour here are the preliminary results. I have posted 3 sets of comparison shots using the Chroma Filter. 2 Sets have been highly oversaturated to exagerate the chroma. Tell me what you think about the results and if you would like an example or have some footage you want tested please let me know and I'll be glad to test it. Also, if you like the results, please compliment David and his team for such great work.

http://www.viproductions.tv/hd10/hd10shots.htm