rusjpnl wrote:"Licenses for the following versions of Neat Video are available:
Neat Video v2.0 plug-in for After Effects (please see license agreement)
Neat Video v2.0 plug-in for Premiere (please see license agreement)
Neat Video v2.0 plug-in for VirtualDub (please see license agreement)
Neat Video v2.0 plug-in for Sony Vegas (please see license agreement)"
JhnZ33 wrote:Does this plugin work with Liquid Edition software?
John
I see. Unless Liquid Edition can support one of these plugins, doesn't look like I'd be able to use it. I'll check with the Liquid forum when I get some time.
someone else on this list mentioned it in a post a couple months back and I ended up buying it. It's an amazing little program
That was me. I downloaded the demo and I really want to purchase it but it's too expensive for me right now. I've tried it on a variety of sources and if the noise isn't too bad, it can really make a difference without detracting too much from the clarity. I found you really need to use the manual functions and in fact a large gray chip chart on the original footage could potentially be a life saver. Auto mode works OK but it doesn't work well for film which has a lot of grain in the mid range but not in the darks or highlights. Anyways, I've gotten to use the demo on a client's footage I transfered which was SUPER grainy. I just masked off the top & bottom to matte it better and cover the "neat video" logo at the bottom. He was MOST impressed with the look. I can only imagine how good it'll look running at full res.
I made some tests last night with Neat Video. This frame was extracted from a RAW grab from my AVT Guppy, using on-the-fly DeBayer in ActiveDcam to RGB24, no compression. I then ran the file through VirtualDubMod with Neat Video plug-in with luminance settings adjusted about 30% less than it self-calibrated too. Sharpening within NV was set to zero. No other changes made in post.
What does "the panel" think?
Frank
{EDIT] Corrected the typos
Off all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
I deliberately refrained from giving my opinion in my last post, but I agree with you. I especially do not like the blockiness that the denoiser adds...if you zoom in close on the girl's face, it is clear to see.
Having said that, on the moving image, the slight softening effect of the denoiser does suit the wedding scene....no one ever said this stuff is easy!!
Frank
Off all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
I agree, I never use any kind of plugin by default, only when really needed and I think the unprocessed frame looks great. Noise reduction is a tricky thing and even though it reduces noise, it also reduces detail along with it so I use it only when necessary. Actually, I have the first movie I shot on super-8 that I'm going to retransfer in the hopefully near-future. A lot of those shots were underexposed and are very grainy while other shots look better. I plan to use NV to reduce the grain on the underexposed stuff JUST to the point where it has a little more grain than the properly shot stuff.
i use noise reduction (or generation) to make shots cut together better. very often needed. otherwise it's usually a bad idea with super 8 since the grain is usually the only thing that's really sharp so the image becomes soft without it.
here's another idea i had: it would be nice with a noise reducer that saved the removed grain for regraining purposes. the idea is that super 8 often needs some edge sharpening to look really good, but that sharpens the grain as well, an often unwanted effect. the workflow would be to remove all the grain completely, save the grain pattern, sharpen the edges quite a bit, then put the grain back. what do you think? i don't have access to such a powerful degrainer so i can't really test it, but it's simple to do using difference mattes.
another use for this workflow is to keep the grain structure intact even during dissolves, blurs, diffusion filters and so on, which otherwise remove the grain creating an artificial look.
believe it or not but i just wrote a regrainer for my degrainer fcp plugin. works really well for both cases i mention above. email me if you want to beta test it. i think it's a must for anyone who works with super 8 digitally, well, on the mac, in fcp. ;-)
I figured you could just make a copy of the film in the timeline, degrain one of them/sharpen, then blend in the original film from the other video track with partial transparancy.
mattias wrote:here's another idea i had: it would be nice with a noise reducer that saved the removed grain for regraining purposes. the idea is that super 8 often needs some edge sharpening to look really good, but that sharpens the grain as well, an often unwanted effect. the workflow would be to remove all the grain completely, save the grain pattern, sharpen the edges quite a bit, then put the grain back. what do you think? i don't have access to such a powerful degrainer so i can't really test it, but it's simple to do using difference mattes.
another use for this workflow is to keep the grain structure intact even during dissolves, blurs, diffusion filters and so on, which otherwise remove the grain creating an artificial look.
/matt
Neat Video effectively has three bits to it as far as I can figure out:
1) Noise analysis
2) Noise removal
3) Sharpening
Each are user adjustable and they claim that their sharpening has the edge (sorry, couldn't resist the pun :lol: ) over separate sharpening because it has prior knowledge of what it considers to be noise. So if noise detection is made sensitive, the noise removal setting to minimum and the sharpening is dialled in, I wonder if it would achieve your aims?
Frank
Off all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
wado1942 wrote:I figured you could just make a copy of the film in the timeline, degrain one of them/sharpen, then blend in the original film from the other video track with partial transparancy.
you could but it's not the same thing. what happens is that you get less grain than before, with less sharpening than you wanted.
RCBasher wrote:So if noise detection is made sensitive, the noise removal setting to minimum and the sharpening is dialled in, I wonder if it would achieve your aims?
sort of. there are two problems though, first the obvious one that windows plugins don't work on mac's, but also that i want the regrain to be a separate function in order to apply it after everything else. my own implementation works really well, only that it's a rather soft (puns galore) noise reduction and for this purpose it would be better to completely remove the grain, for which you need a statistical and/or motion compensating algorithm.
