I'm in love.

[Brandon Hammonds]

Thanks for posting Adam. I'm pretty impressed. I run into this issue pretty often with my xh-a1. I usually roll with a 75w light and if I need to be in someones grill I diffuse it (dryer sheet + tape/rubber band).

I'm on CS3 and I've never had success with the shadow/highlight tool. I would be interested to see how the final output from the neat plugin would compare to a "levels" adjustment. I tried working off the bitmap you posted, but I was getting pure grain. I'm assuming you would have better luck working off the source. So if you have time and our interested, maybe you could check:

add levels effect > first (RGB) White from 255 to ~220 > second (RGB) black from 0 to whatever it can handle

That's how I usually make subtle adjustments, no doubt others have a better method.

[Adam Haro]

Hey Brandon,

I'll give it a try tomorrow when I'm in the office.

[Joe Woolbright]

I've been using this for a while and it is a great tool. A couple of things to be aware of is if you use Vegas there is a problem with the rendered output being off 3 frames (or something like that). The second is the render time is incredibly long if you use it on a long clip.

[Adam Haro]

Alright Brandon heres some pics for you. Pic 1 is the original. Pic. 2 is brightened with shadow/highlights Pic 3 is pic 2 with neatvideo. Pic 4 is the original brightened with your method, levels rgb white from 255 to 150 black from 0 to 5. Pic 5 is pic 4 with neatvideo added.

[Brandon Hammonds]

Thanks, Adam!

The neatvideo plugin definitely yields cleaner results. A softer image, but much preferable to the grain.

[Adam Haro]

You really need to play with it and find good settings, sometimes it makes the picture way too soft, but finding the minimal amount that cleans the picture up seems to work best for me.

[Douglas Thigpen]

I've been using this plug-in for Premiere for a bit over a year now, the best $100 I've ever spent for post processing event footage. (not that I use it often, but when it's needed, it does an amazing job)

[Patrick Moreau]

i think you could get more out of this using nattress curves (natress.com - not sure if that is mac only), a 3 way color corrector, and perhaps some softening to hide the grain - which i see in the image but i'm not sure if i wouldn't just prefer the grain.

if you can send me a 5 second clip i'de be happy to try and do a comparison with a combo of simple filters.

P.

[Paul Mailath]

Just got it, just tried it - fanfriggintastic!

I've got some footage of the 1st dance and audience where the DJ turned the lights down and my little HV20 kindly compensated by pushing the gain up to buggery. It's turned from crap into usable footage

thank you

**neatvideo**

[Denny Kyser]

Originally Posted by Paul Mailath

Just got it, just tried it - fanfriggintastic!

I've got some footage of the 1st dance and audience where the DJ turned the lights down and my little HV20 kindly compensated by pushing the gain up to buggery. It's turned from crap into usable footage

thank you

Are you talking about neatvideo or natress curves.

[Ethan Cooper]

I got Neat Video about 2 weeks ago and thank the good lord I don't have to export out Tiff sequences anymore to use clean up my footage with their software. I've always thought their Neat Image photoshop plugin was a wonderful thing and this FCP version is just as good for video.

It takes forever to render out, but the results especially when using advanced mode using sharpening and adding back in a little bit of grain is amazing. Love, love, love this plugin. The $100 I spent on the plugin will allow me to continue using my little FX7's for another year or so saving me $1000's of bucks on upgrades.

[Jim Snow]

There is another benefit to removing or reducing grain noise. That is when doing the output rendering to MPEG. It takes much higher bitrates to encode grainy video. That's because to the encoder, it sees the grain as additional detail that must be encoded. The result of this is that the quality of the "real" parts of your video is reduced at an given bitrate when encoding a grainy video. Since the maximum allowable bitrate for DVD is 9,800 Kb/sec., you can't just boost bitrate to overcome this problem. Conventional wisdom suggests keeping the bitrate below 9,000 Kb/sec. to assure player compatibility. It's important to make the best use of the available bitrate to render the actual video at the best quality. Grainy video just gets in the way.

A good encoding bitrate test is to shoot a tree with small leaves on a very windy day against a blue sky. All of the fast motion of the fluttering leave and contrast against the blue sky is quite a burden for the encoder. You can compound the motion even more by doing a slow pan while shooting. First shoot with your shutter and iris adjusted so that your shot is at 0db. Then adjust your shutter, iris and ND filter as necessary so that you shoot at +12 or +18db. Then compare the results by encoding at various bitrates. This will clearly demonstrate what happens when the encoder is "preoccupied" with encoding the grain as well as the desired content of the video itself. There are many more motion artifacts on the edges of the fluttering leaves when the video is grainy compared to a no grain shot.

[Winfried Dobbe]

Yes, neat video is great.
So far, I have found only 2 "serious" denoise filters. The first one is neat video, the second is "De:Noise" from Re:Vision effects. I'm using the latter one, since it's available for Final Cut.