Remove Noise from Canon ZR850
 

I have a Canon ZR850, which is notorious for bad, bad, REALLY bad low light noise. I have Sony Vegas 7, the newest release, and an assortment of plugins.

The noise is almost acceptable on a normal CRT, but if I watch the clips on an LCD with even the smallest amount of sharpening, it looks like a snowstorm.

Is there a good filter or process I could use to fix some of that noise?

You know, in Photoshop CS2 and CS3 there are some POWERFUL noise reduction tools. I assume those filters can work with Adobe's NLE, but as I have Vegas, that's moot.

I'm attaching a sample of the extreme noise. Actually looks a lot better on the monitor than on a television.

What do you think?

DJ Kinney

A few users here and on other Vegas forums have been highly recommending the noise reduction plug-in from Neat Video.
A trial version is available.

Neat Video 'Home Version', as they rather unwisely call it, is just $49, and the single difference from the Pro version (that affects Vegas users) is that you can only filter noise from an area up to 720 x 576 pixels (which is fine if you are working in SD). The Pro version is unlimited size therefore suited to HD editors.

I have downloaded the demo (for After Effects, actually, but I guess it uses the same engine) and it is very impressive, even the presets return great results.

While typing this I downloaded the Vegas demo and had a very quick play. Seems to be just as impressive. I hear the creaking of plastic . . .

http://www.neatvideo.com/index.html

Ian . . .

Holy $#!t! I've attached a sample of the NeatVideo filter. It's really quite unbelievable. The render time is atrocious, but I suppose it's a trade. I've rarely been this impressed by a filter. Wow.

DJ Kinney

Wow! I'm sold! That gets it down to the point that the blacks can be crushed into being noiseless and the subject and background objects look very clean. Am I wrong in saying that this could make 12db of gain look like no gain was used? That would be a miracle for some footage.

Wow again. As much as I like the cleanup of the blacks, the skintones look like a good makeup artist caked on a nice coat of spackle. Outstanding. Marcus, I agree, 12db with aplomb (well, it needs some testing).

I too am really impressed with this filter. My wife used a Sony HC96 and was at 15 db gain most of the time so I thought it would be a good test of the filter to clean up. The render time in Premiere was about 8 times realtime with my X2 4200 but the results were matched to my FX1 at 6db very well. I shall certainly get this for the few occations that I need to clean up some video. Just out of interest I ran a short test with FX1 clip and the result was wonderful clean image. All was using the pressets so I am sure a little more effort would yeild even better results. I like the fact that one can create a noise image for a camera and save as preset.

Ron Evans

Um..that's my natural, beautiful, hollywood skin, man. I don't need a makeup artist. ;-)

Sorry DJ, the left side of that picture is calling you a liar. (grin)

Seriously though, that plug-in looks great. I'm going to chase it down.

-gb-

lol. what's funnier is that you could do better still. i cleaned up hours of at least +18dB otherwise-unuseable hi-def footage recently, of course using neatvideo. your shot still has low frequency noise, mostly chroma noise. you can take care of this in the neatvideo settings. on top of that, in your video editor, if you suppress the saturation for very low luma portions, the black will look very clean (in sony vegas you can use the saturation plugin with a hard dip JUST below the luma-level for the parts you care about).