Noise reduction in Premiere Pro CS5

[Guest]

Hi,

what is the best way to reduce noise in Premiere Pro CS5 (64bit Windows 7)? I have learned that many people thinks the Neat Video plug-in is the best choice for noise reduction. Is it so or does Premiere CS5 or AE CS5 itself include some special tricks for noise reduction? In the Neat Video's download page

http://www.neatvideo.com/download.html

one can select between Premiere or AE plug-ins. Is it wiser to do noise reduction in Premiere or in After Effects?

Any help and tips are welcomed.

[Todd_Kopriva]

The Remove Grain effect in After Effects is worth a try before you spend extra money on Neat Video. Be sure to read the instructions, since the Noise & Grain effects are more complex than many effects.

[Keith_Goodwin]

I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, but do not have a remove grain effect as described in the tutorial you linked to.  Do you have any idea why I would not have this effect?

[Todd_Kopriva]

> I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, but do not have a remove grain effect as described in the tutorial you linked to.  Do you have any idea why I would not have this effect?

If you're referring to my post, then read it again. I was recommending the Remove Grain effect in After Effects, not Premiere Pro.

[Keith_Goodwin]

Thanks for the quick reply.

[the_wine_snob]

Welcome to the forum. Neat Video is certainly a handy add-on tool, and I use it often. Note: adding a touch of Unsharp Mask, or similar, after Neat Video "perks" things up nicely, but go small on this.

AE is fully equipped to do more, and would definitely be worth a look, especially if one is doing a Comp anyway.

Good luck,

Hunt

PS - as another tip, if one anticipates the use of Neat Video Effect, start the shooting with a plain blank surface (gray card, or similar) in the same lighting with the same settings, as this gives one something to survey and calibrate on. Save that calibration, and apply it to all Clips with those parameters. One can still tweak by Clip, if necessary.

[Huntrex]

The "Dust and Scratches" effect can be useful in noise reduction. Yes, there are much better alternatives available (like Neat Video), but for light NR in a pinch Dust and Scratches may do the job.

[Nanda_KP]

hi,

NeatVideo is well worth the money - AE/PPro noise/grain effects do not do as good a job.

The latest NeatVideo (v3) exploits BOTH CPU And GPU - earlier versions used CPU only and it resulted in long export times.

If you are on Mac, I recently read about Video Purifier from Innobits.
At the top end there is Nucoda, but which I don't think will apply here.

A tip I received from a filmmaker is to use the lowest gain setting possible with ample lighting so that you have as low noise as possible to begin with.

-Nanda

[Ann Bens]

Neat Video tends to look a little plastic.

If you got extra money to spend have a look at DE:noise from RE;Vision

No connections to the firm, just like the plugin.

[Nanda_KP]

If you configure NeatVideo settings correctly, you should be able to avoid the plastic look.

De:Noise seems impressive in that it appears to offers more control over how to reduce noise.

-Nanda

[the_wine_snob]

Nanda,

My usage of Neat Video has been about like yours. Yes, it takes some tweaking, but can look surprisingly good.

Have not tried Ann's suggested software, but will look into it. Thanks Ann.

Hunt

[D3S_user]

Late to this party but, from Dave LeRonde at CC:  http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WSAE104790-DF54-4d29-84BC-91E9F2617773a.html

There is a new product in the pipeline: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20120415-900555.html

HTH's, it is for moi.

RM

[cfg_2451]

Stahlberg wrote:

Is it wiser to do noise reduction in Premiere or in After Effects?

In my experience, NeatVideo in PPro is the better choice. I get around a 10x improvement in export speed if I use Neat Video in PPro, vs using the Remove Grain effect in AE. And I like the results from Neat Video better.

Now, NV isn't perfect. It's not intuitive. It's difficult to control. I find that looking at what it does to a single frame isn't representative of what the resulting moving video looks like, which makes it hard to judge and decided how much is too much (when in doubt, use less). It seems to be sensitive to other effects in the stack above it too -- if you use the three way color corrector, for example, you should nail that down first before you even set up NV, because tweeking the TWCC after the fact can throw off NV. And if you try to sharpen with NV it tends to increase contrast and extend shadows down and highlights up (not subtle: you see this visually and can verify with a waveform monitor).

I had to buy the pro version just because I'm working with 1080 sources, but I feel like it's a good value for what it does. Saved my bacon on a couple of low light interviews.

[GWeglarz]

I use Neat Denoise and and am very pleased with it. I have to turn the effect off when MC editing because the effect doesn't update in real time.

I have another question. Does anyone know if the Neat Denoiser is respected when you ->Send to Encore? I sent over two sequences as timelines, but when they transcoded, the final output still had the noise. The effect was turned on in both sequences.

Any ideas, or is this a Neat issue?

[Guest]

The noise reduction guys at Cinnafilm created a low cost version of their uber-exepensive Dark Energy Texture Manager as a plug-in into Ae. 

From what I understand, it is supposed to be all of the noise removal quality and film simulation of their big, high-end suite, but plug-in type performance and a plug-in type of price.

Perhaps it is worth a try.