Noise and compression artifact removal
 

I have been put onto some good noise and compression artifact removal software/plug-ins. There is both still and video versions. I don't know if it is tuned for Mpeg4 compression artifacts removal though.

http://www.neatimage.com/
http://www.neatvideo.com/index.html?snim


re-edit:

Hopefully should lead to more compressible cleaner files in post for the HD1's low light problem, and for the stills.

Have delved further, looked over the examples, and the results are pretty amazing. I have compared the before and after file sizes on their site, and mostly reductions upto less then half the original size, usually less reduction for the stills. I must admit this does not entirely make sense, I think the re-compressor they are using is not doing such a good job, otherwise I would expect more reduction on average than this. Some minor loss in detail at times, and gain in some other places, as it tries to predict what is what. But still very nice.

http://www.neatimage.com/examples.html
http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html
http://www.neatimage.com/reviews.html

Reported to be very good too (see conclusions)
http://www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise.htm

There's also this, though it seems to be compatible with Premier etc only whereas the one you've found is said to work with VirtualDub.
There is an interesting example of a roof halfway down the page:

http://www.revisionfx.com/smokgal.htm

I've been trying some of the deinterlace filters available for VirtualDub, I know it's 720p, but one of their functions is to attempt to reduce jaggies and, frame by frame, they don't know they are dealing with progessive material.
I haven't found one that really produces anything helpful on those clips I put up a couple of weeks ago, but I'll download and try the Neat Video demo.

They are available for a number of different programs I understand.

I've downloaded some of the clips, and it seems to produce some odd crawl, but then again they were too compressed to expect much better I think.

Have a look for dscaler, open source and supposedly very good. I don't know if it has the functionality your after. There is one more scaler at sourceforge.net, and I saw one at digital Anarchy (but I am still yet to read through a review on that).

If you're looking for fast and efficient video noise removal, nothing beats Avisynth and its incredible filters collection.
You'll need some video filtering knowledge to find the right combination of filters, though, but it's worth the time spent on it...

www.avisynth.org

Thanks for this Steven.

Is it intelligent, and tries to faithfully restore the noisy parts of the image?


Wayne.

Avisynth is a scripting language beloved of the Doom 9 DVD/TV ripping community (which I'm sure Steve isn't a member of !) since, once learned, it is fast, flexible and particularly appealing to those who like programming. Rather like unix was...

However, it has no graphical interface, which puts it beyond the pale as far as I am concerned. I prefer to leave command line programming to others these days!. Virtualdub, on the other hand does have a graphical interface, an excellent set of filters, and you can instantly try out out and see their effect, if required on a frame by frame basis.

(I have done my fair share of command line programming... in fact my first days in computing were spent before even a command line was invented, hand booting and patching prototype mainframes from the console switches etc.!)

There is a lot of GUI for Avisynth, however, opening a script in virtual dub and hit "reload" when you change a parameter is a lot more efficient that using the VirtualDub Filter tab (where you need a lot of clic to access filter properties...). And another good reason to use avisynth instead of vdub filter is that vdub works in RGB internally so a lot of colorspace conversion are needed, which is bad since they aren't lossless and cost a lot of cpu cycles. (well it's irrevelent if your source is RGB but it's quite rare nowadays)

@Wayne : well it's intelligent if you're intelligent ;) There is a lot of filters, from the more basics to the more advanced, and even more than advanced when you combine everything with the powerfull scripting feature of avisynth.
After that, everything depend on the source noise and trade-off you're willing to make.
I

Found some restorative motion software
 

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=74760

MotionDSP, free on Youtube.

Interesting, I've emailed them a link to that shot of my Trachycarpus (the palm!) which shows our problem quite clearly. They do seem to suggest that they are after lower res stuff than our output tho'.

To update this thread, I had a reply from these people. They confirm they are really aiming this product at lower res stuff, phone cam output etc, but they will try it and let me know the results.

Neat video is easy to use and works very well. The best I've tried, and I've tried various avisynth scripts too. Try the demo!