Fractal + Turbulent Noise in After Effects

New on PVC... Motion backgrounds, transitions, clouds, fog, fire, water, paper texture, metal and other textures, ink and watercolor effects, etc. are all effects that can be generated by Fractal Noise filters built into After Effects.

Highlights of Fractal Noise in After Effects, plus the newer Turbulent Noise effect, include a good description of it and some nice performance tips in AE Help, and in-depth looks by Chris Zwar and Harry Frank.

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Note: Harry Frank's Medical Fund... Harry's family is trying to raise money to help cover the costs related to surgery and recovery. Even after insurance, the surgery is quite expensive and requires more than the Frank family can afford, ever.

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,

Noise Annoys - Neat Video versus Magic Bullet Denoiser from Andrew Reid on Vimeo.

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."

Noise reduction before color correction: MB Denoiser review

Scott Simmons looks at Magic Bullet Suite 10’s new Denoiser plug-in at PVC. Among the details is to apply noise reduction before color correction, something recommended by Stu Maschwitz. There's also a generous link to a Cow tutorial by Michael Park, Grainy Footage Rescue using Magic Bullet Denoiser.

[update: see also a MB Denoiser review by Steve Douglas on Ken Stone's FCP]

Update: There are a number of other noise filters available, like the Remove Grain effect built into After Effects (see video below by Matthew Borgatti), or DE:Noise, Neat Video (AdobeTV demo), Video Purifier and so forth. On the AE-list (Nov 20, 2010), Brian Behm commented on noise reduction for keying:

"I think you'll find there isn't a definitive answer out there because there's no definitive answer. When I'm keying footage shot on a T2i (fairly similar to the 7D video wise) I sometimes need to denoise and I sometimes don't.

In general though, when I do denoise it's early in the process before the key and then afterwards I'll go back and grain sample the original footage and add it back to my composited scene. Generally you're denoising as a way to assist in pulling a cleaner key so it makes sense that you'd do that before you pull the key."

Remove banding in After Effects

It's a bit of a mystery why there's still so much banding in TV & web graphics. Maybe people can't preview in the appropriate color space or codec to see banding, which may be eliminated by adding the AE Noise filter (or Add Grain) at about 5% (maybe on an adjustment layer). The stuff on cable systems is subject to God knows what compression and recompression, so being conservative with gradients may be the better part of valor. Also, if you're using the Ramp plug-in increasing Ramp Scatter may help.

...read the rest of the updated article -- now on ProVideo Coalition.

Magic Bullet Denoiser + Magic Bullet Suite 10

Magic Bullet Denoiser is a new noise reduction filter for After Effects, apparently reworked from a filter in the discontinued Magic Bullet Steady. Denoiser's customizable controls let you smooth out chroma blotches and banding, focus noise reduction on shadows or highlights and perform separate adjustments for red, green, and blue channel offsets, while motion estimation algorithms help preserve fine detail in high-motion shots.

Denoiser is part of the new Magic Bullet Suite 10 for CS4, CS4, and CS5, which offers the Magic Bullet product line at a big discount.

Update: Of course there are a variety of de-noise filters; Noise reduction in AE noted a few of these. Peter Litwinowicz of RevisionFX noted that DE:Noise version 2 is in some cases twice as fast as the previous version, and that "a combination of feature-sensitive spatial blurring, along with tracking (and the ability to use both, or either independently) is what we've found the most useful."

Noise reduction in AE

In this After Effects tutorial, you'll see how Adobe evangelist Jason Levine uses Neat Video, a noise reduction filter, to clean up noise in footage.

It would have been nice to see how AE's built-in Remove Grain filter performed on the demo footage (it performs far better than a Median filter). Other options include RE:Vision Effects DE:Noise, which uses sensitive spatial filtering along with time-based optical flow methods, and Digital Anarchy Beauty Box and Revision FX SmoothKit and DE:Noise.

Digital Anarchy returns with AE filter Beauty Box

Digital Anarchy returns with a new After Effects/NLE filter, Beauty Box (Mac/Win). Some commercials featuring older actresses suffer from a heavy hand on Median or Blur filters. This filter seems more precise, fast, and easy; see the video overview of Beauty Box for a quick peek.

Here's some detail:

"Beauty Box uses face detection to automatically identify skin tones and create a mask that limits the smoothing effect to just the skin areas. This automated process usually requires little or no input from the user and does not involve hand masking.

Just apply the filter, click auto-detect, set the amount of smoothing, and render. This is designed to speed up the workflow that is usually required for skin retouching. Effects artists and editors no longer have to manually create masks and retouch frame by frame.

The skin smoothing itself is also new technology. It keeps the important features of the face sharp while reducing or eliminating wrinkles and blemishes. By incorporating state-of-the-art face detection and smoothing algorithms, Beauty Box is designed to give actors a makeover in post-production."

Neat Video, a noise reduction filter

Forgot to add this one to the list...

Neat Video has a noise reduction plug-in for After Effects, Premiere, VirtualDub that provides "the most accurate video noise reduction currently available" using device noise profiles to reduce sensor noise, as well as reducing visible grain and compression artifacts.

Sounds good, though I haven't tried it, some Photoshop users seem to prefer it to Grain Surgery, the basis of the Reduce Noise filter built into AE.

DE:Noise, a new AE filter

RE:Vision Effects just released a new de-noising product, DE:Noise. This filter "uses smart feature-sensitive spatial filtering and motion estimation (optical flow) techniques to help improve the visual quality of sequences with problems such as: noisy video (than can appear in low-light video captures), dust, excessive film grain, CG renders affected by ray-tracing undersampling, fingerprints, snow, drop-outs, and other small artifacts."