Cleaning up Image Noise in Post
 

Hi! Using the HVR100U, and encountering the low-light issues, what are the best methods of cleaning up the visual noise in post?

Try neatvideo
Neat Video :: download

Adjust the contrast and saturation to hide those ugly low light pixels...

Adjusting, adjusting, adjusting away...
 

Thanks for the reply - I've been playing in Color with doing just that but the grain seems to be multi-colored. Also noticed that in a wedding footage, while the bride & groom were well lit, (they were under can-lights, actually kinda over lit) the camera made the background (far wall of the church) all grainy...

Ever tried taking the front sun shade off? Does that let in more light?

O.K. - this is insane!!!
 

I have turned on the Data option in the menu, and I've been watching what the camera is doing. I generally use manual settings.

For my grainiest footage, I have found out that my F-stop was at a 2, my shutter speed was at 60, and the auto gain was at 15-18.

Ready for the best part?

At the absolute grainiest, when the gain hit 15 - 18, the subjects were STANDING DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH CAN LIGHTS. Folks, the Lord Himself couldn't have illuminated them brighter.

During the b-roll the gain stayed between 3 and 6, then throughout the ceremony it camped out at 15. Here are some stills - the wide shot from behind was my wife's can Elura 85.

Here is still number 2...
 

Sorry for the mess-up.

Remember, he is standing underneath the lights...

while the HD1000 will never compete with the PD series, DSR series, EX series or Z series, for a 1 chip camera that freeze you posted really doesn't look all that bad.

Unfortunately grain is very hard to get rid of with hurting the remainder of the image but I think Neatvideo might be the way to go.

Color, levels, gain (in post) isn't going to help. Again though it really doesn't look all that bad at least based on the freeze you posted.

I tried it....
 

Wow. That's all I can say. Amazing. Thanks for the tip!

Hi Marc,


it doesn't look that bad, ...if you want, you can get the Magic Bullet Looks plug in to give you more options..

Double-thanks for the tip. I've just been looking at the filtration examples and the difference is absolutely stunning.

It this sort of discovery that adds to the value of coming here. Thanks again.

Andrew

Grain without bad lighting
 

Grain without bad lighting. This is one issue that really gets your heart racing. I had a similar experience on a recent wedding. The sanctuary had 8ft tall windows spaced about every 4 ft, florescents overhead, and incandescent cans over the alter area. Lots of light and lots of color grain. I think the mix of light temperatures throws off the sensor as it tries to make the best of the varied lighting. I will try to find a screengrab to share.

In my experience, this camera does best in outdoor sunlight or professional stage lighting. Everything else can really get unexpected results. Glad that neat video helped out. I have it saved in my links for the next time I run into this issue...

With the "remove the lens hood" idea: leave the thing ON the camera. You will suffer more stray light problems than you can imagine that will degrade the image.

Not only that, it protects the most important part of the camera; The first thing the light passes through on its way to the tape..the front element of the lens.

Stuff that up, and you have a very expensive paperweight.

Ben

Hi Marc,

Since grain is hard to "fix", it is of course best to avoid in the first place. Luisa Winters, the Adobe trainer, taught me this - turn DOWN the gain, then brighten the footage in post. Much easier to clean up an image that is not grainy, and HDV allows more room for correction than DV.

I shoot with the Sony FX7, and have found that anything above 6 GAIN on that camera is unacceptable to me (where I would go 9 or even 12 with a VX-2000). In the camera menu, I set the AUTO GAIN LIMIT to +6, so it won't go above that (unless I manually override).

Another trick is to set the shutter speed to 30 when in a dark church. Fast pans will stutter at 30, but most ceremony shots are pretty static, and 30 shutter will definitely add some brightness when shooting "in a cave", as some churches seem. A very fair trade.

I never had much luck brightening DV footage, as it would fall apart pretty quickly, but HDV clips are much more forgiving and I can push the color correction farther with good results. Just throttle back on that gain when shooting, 15-18 will be nasty on any prosumer camera.

I don't know what software you edit with, but don't just use the "Brightness" slider, this brightens the entire image, meaning blacks will wash out. Use a 3-way corrector, where you can change the Highlights, MidTones and Shadows (white, gray, black) individually. This allows you to tweak the image, usually pushing up midtones and maybe bringing the blacks down a bit to make them blacker, maybe a little Highlights, you'll figure it out

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Oh wow, seeing Jeff Pulera here really makes my day. Hey Jeff, welcome to the forum and thanks for joining.

Everybody, ignore that "new boot" status he currently has. Jeff is an absolute guru, especially with the Matrox X.2 real time hardware etc. Oh, and he's also a really good bloke too.

Andrew

Hey Jeff, welcome to the forum. That is some very sound advice but unfortunately with this particular model, there is no manual gain control. The gain is linked to the exposure control so you have to go manual on exposure and either assign it to the ring or keep it close by on the touchscreen menu. I like to keep mine on page one of the quick access menu and often ride the exposure on the ring. I find this gain control to be the biggest drawback to the 1000u and hope that if Sony ever releases an updated version that they will separate the gain control from the exposure.

grain removal in a 64-bit install of vegas 9
 

So I am wrapping a wedding edit (Shot on my HD1000U and PD170) and have a few scenes with horrendous color noise issues. I have upgraded to a Win 7 64-bit machine and from what i can tell, NeatVideo is only for a 32-bit install. Do you guys have any recommendations for correcting this? Thanks!

32-bit software should still run on the 64-bit Windows 7, via it invoking "XP mode".

Have you tried getting it to install?

Andrew

Unfortunately my system crashes when i enable VM in the bios and according to the manufacturer (EVGA) forum this is a known issue without support at this time. So I cannot install the XP virtual machine mode. Is there something close to NeatVideo for a 64 bit system?

Would it be easier to install it on a friends computer and use that one for the video processing?

Andrew

Andrew,
Thanks for your thoughts. I am guessing since no one else is chiming in with ideas that there isn't anything else that comes close. Guess I will dust off my old XP core 2 quad machine and run it through on that. I was really hoping there was something else or that a 64-bit version existed even though it wasn't on the website...

Not to worry. At least you are able to get the job done rather than hitting a dead-end.

Kinda interesting how we all work with the idea that everything should be achievable on a single computer.

Andrew

Not to get too far off-topic but I say we should be able to do it all on one computer that is a tablet laptop weighing no more than 3 lbs. with 72 hrs of battery life, dual i7 processors and 24 GB of ram with full hdmi/7.1 surround out has a BD-r DL burner and costs less than $500. But as you pointed out dreams and reality are often very different.

I just hate going back to the C2Q machine because it is so much slower when working with the HDV clips...

Heck as long as we are dreaming, I wish Sony would give us faithful HD1000U users free upgrades to an HD2000U that had XDCAM EX and 3 huge CMOS sensors and low-light capability to rival my old pd170...but I will stick to my HD1000U and just try to figure out better ways to fix this in post. :)

It takes along time to render so maybe you're better off with the second computer.

MSU's denoising filter (for VirtualDub) is one of the best I've ever seen.

MSU Denoiser Filter

Hey man I feel your pain. We recently upgraded to macs here at the studio so now all is well, but before we had a pc with xp 64 on it and there were days when I wanted to throw it in the street. We were constantly running into compatibility issues with the 64 bit platform. I understand the industry is moving toward 64 bit OS but for me at this point I don't see a real gain in performance over the 32 bit stuff. Snow Leopard can boot in 64 when I want to but for now we're sticking to 32. Hope you figure it all out and you have better luck with 64 than me.

We see a huge performance boost in working with HD clips in a 64-bit environment. The additional ram really speeds up rendering and has made a huge difference in preview playback. The 64-bit compatibility can be an issue, though.

NeatVideo Pro has a 64-bit version.
 

So I reached out to the technical staff at NeatVideo and here is what they had to say:

They also sent me this link for more information.

http://www.neatvideo.com/news.html#N...-bit-2009-6-26

So the lesson here is, as great as DVInfo is for information, sometimes you need to go to the source. I should also note that I got both replies in approx 30 min after sending inquiry on a Sunday night. Talk about great support! Top notch product and support, gotta love it.

Even in 64 bit, an iMac that has a 8gig ram limit can't use more than 8 gigs right? That was my understanding at least.

For anyone using Vegas that needs noise reduction Mike Crash has a number of free plugins ported from the best of the open source ones including a noise reduction plugin. I haven't tried the Neat Video plugin but those that have tried both claim Mike's is as good if not better. For the price it's certainly worth a try: Mike Crash Homepage - Content

As for the HD1000, I have the HC5 which is pretty much the same camera. We use it to shoot stage productions a B cam next to my EX1. Most of those sample shots look overexposed to some extent. Try setting Scene Selection to Spotlight. We go further and set EV Offset to -1.

I am not sure about macs since I don't use them. I believe the O/S limit for Windows 7 Ultimate is 192GB but my motherboard maxes out at 24GB. I am currently running 12GB of ram until the price comes down on the 4GB ram sticks.

Bob,
I really like Mike Crash's plug-ins but have not re-installed them since upgrading systems. I will have to see if they are 64-bit install compatible. Thanks for the reminder.

Robert,
Thanks for the recommendation. Somehow I missed your post the first time out and just now saw it. I will check that one out for future reference.

Thanks!