Hi there, I was wondering if anyone knows of some good 'de-noise' plug in, for final cut. Or perhaps a plug in suite that can also help de-video DV and hdv - i.e, remove noise, remove or smooth jagged artefacts and so on.


any recommendations would be much appreciated

well there is DE: Nosie from Re: Vision Effects ... though that is more designed for reducing excessive, dirt , defects etc
RE:Vision Effects, Inc. : Products: DE:Noise (http://www.revisionfx.com/products/denoise/)

from your description it sounds like you're looking for a film look plugin (which amongst other things, often has parameters for adding noise rather than removing it) ... if the film look is what you're after then the Nattress Film Effects plugins are good
Nattress: Film Effects (http://www.nattress.com/Products/filmeffects/filmeffects.htm)

Thanks for the links, i'll check them out


- im not looking for the film look, per se- to me, the 'film look' can be so many elements- wide contrast ratio, grain, anamorphic flare and so on.

I'm interested in basically cleaning up what i deem as 'cheap' looking video.

I want to want the footage my company films, (usually on HDV), look like it was filmed on much better cameras. So i want to remove the artifects that can occur with hdv, get rid of some of the noise, and give it the feel like the footage was shot on a better format, with larger ccds

I almost after the video equivalent of the noise ninja plug in for photoshop. Noise ninja profiles your camera, and over time you can fine tune the profile for each stills camera you have, and vastly improve footage shot at high iso, with lots of noise. Its also great at removing compression artifacts too

Photoshop CS3 can work with video, and i did try bringing in footage and using noise ninja. Results were good, but it took forever to process a very short clip- so not really practical.

you can try the free Noise Reduction filters here too

Too Much Too Soon Free Plugins for Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express (http://www.mattias.nu/plugins/)

I tried other denoisers, but for me, Neat Video, a multi-NLE plugin (including Mac/FCP) totally outclasses them. I have used it on Windows apps (Sony Vegas and VirtualDub) for a couple of years following my own evaluation of several alternative plugins and tools (including some in AviSynth). It seems to achieve it in part by image element (pixel?) motion estimation (tracking), a heavy task for the CPU, in order to do get maximum benefit from temporal (multi-frame) denoising. More effective than "Smart Denoising" where moving (changing) areas are (as I understand it) simply ignored.

Just now I ran some comparisons of various denoiser plugins for Final Cut over some noisy footage from an EX3 (where exposure had been too low so I had boosted the levels in FCP's 3-Way Color Corrector). Neat Video gave me the best results by far.

For the FCP test I used their free demo, which is crippled to only denoise a central rectangle of the image. Handy for comparing against the original noise at the edge though. The configuration settings are relatively complex but one soon get used to their basics (noise level estimation, denoising strength, radius i.e. no. of frames for temporal denoising) and the quality is worth the effort.

neatvideo is very good! you have to know how to use it but it can save a lot of noisy footage. I tried the others and the freebies and none come as close.

Yep, I tried quite a few de-noisers on FCP, from re:vision and others, and none come close to the quality of Neat Video. the problems with the others is usually you sacrifice the image sharpness, making the image softer in order to get a smoother image. The Neat Video does a pretty good job in analyzing the noise, even showing you in different RGB images where you have the most noise. there are many tweakings you can do to it but you can get quick and good results with it with barely affecting the sharpness.
It is so far the best plugin for cleaning the image from noise artifacts, price wise and result wise.

I'll jump on the Neat Video praise bandwagon. Fantastic plug-in worth every penny.

You can get rid of alot of that "video" look by lighting, exposing, focusing, framing and blocking very carefully.

Make sure you're not under exposing your shots. and that you're providing enough light for the camera to get a clean image.

To clean up some jaggies, you can do some color space conversion tricks (not sure if it'll work in FCP), but convert to YUV (maybe LAB as well?) , blur the color channels slightly (the 1:1 in the 4:1:1 colorspace) and convert back to RGB after. This will preserve the full detail in the b/w bits but smooth up the color bits.

Most of your noise will be in the blacks, so if you drop them slightly and crush the darks with a color corrector, some of the noise will disappear. It'll have to end up being more of a "Look" than anything else.

Neat Video is outstanding. However, keep in mind that this plug is heavy on memory, and since FCP only can use 2.5GB of RAM, I've had numerous crashes and freezes using NV (with a window stating that NV cannot get the memory resources required). This being said, there are ways to help avoid the issue (turning of multi-processor in the options of NV). Still, even with the freezes it's worth the price.