December 4, 2010

Remove noise and grain in AE


Andrew Devis has a new tutorial, Neat Video: Removing Noise and Grain from your Footage, which shows:

"... how to use the Neat Video plug-in for multiple applications. Although demonstrated in After Effects, the work-flow is essentially the same for all these applications: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Nuke, Fusion, Vegas Pro, etc. This powerful but simple to use plug-in can clean up noisy footage by applying a sophisticated and advanced algorithm to work out what's noise and what's details in your footage and then remove just the noise.

This is done by profiling the noise properties in an area of a video frame without visible features. Once the noise has been profiled, Neat Video is guided by this profile to reduce and eliminate noise while not touching the video details. Although mostly automatic, Neat Video still leaves you with total control over the amount of filtering you apply and even offers optional sharpening (without sharpening the noise) should you wish it."


There isn't a definitive algorithm for universal use, so there are a number of other noise filters available, like the Remove Grain effect and other Noise & Grain effects built into After Effects (see video below by Matthew Borgatti), and RE:Vision Effects DE:Noise (which uses sensitive spatial filtering along with time-based optical flow methods), Magic Bullet Denoiser, PHYX Cleaner (Fxplug), Innobits Video Purifier (Mac app), and so forth -- along with Median filters, Digital Anarchy Beauty Box, Revision FX SmoothKit, and similar.

Additional resources can be found in the AE Help links above and in Noise reduction before color correction: MB Denoiser review, Noise reduction in AE (Neat Video on AdobeTV by Jason Levine), Grain Matching on new PVC channel, nice sections of After Effects Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen (review), and other items from AEP.

Here's Matthew Borgatti on Noise Reduction and Boosting Found Footage using Remove Grain with color correction and some color replacement on artifacts:


Update: No Film School notes a Vimeo comparison of Neat and MB DeNoiser,



Update: 5tu reminds us that "Deartifacting using the DV Rebel Tools in After Effects produces similar chroma smoothing results with less luma noise." [running with it here; he was referring to 5DtoRGB]
@freshdv RTs "@lettershome: Quality wise 5dtoRGB blows doors off Grinder, Compressor and Mpeg Streamclip...and its free for now."

Later there was an update, found in Rebel's Guide on your iPad or Kindle, DV Rebel Tools For Free; here's the support video:

DV Rebel Tools Free for After Effects CS5 from Stu Maschwitz on Vimeo.

And much later, Richard Harrington posted a course "Fixing Video Exposure Problems in Premiere Pro" on Lynda, which contains "Removing grain with After Effects."

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