Comments

Grazie wrote on 12/4/2003, 2:49 AM
I'm presuming you are meaning "grainy" - that's your noisy bit -yeah?

Okay, how much of this footage have you got? Is it totally imperative that it is included? Can it be reshot? - I have to ask these questions. . .

Well, you could apply a very and I mean a very soft Blur. Very low, I think the setting could be as low as 0.0001 or 0.0002 - try it. See if it flattens out the graininess. The other thing is to treat it as is and make something of it. Maybe apply Black and White fx to get a more contrasty look. Depending on the emotion/feeling of the footage you could go over-the-top and actually make a "feature" out of the footage. If you go down this route then there is a whole shed load of stuff you could experiment with. Would be good to use the piece as a "backdrop" to the central images? I've had success by using this approach and had "other" footage in the middle - yeah?

Now others may have some knowledge with using "other" software to remove the graininess - I don't know or use such s/w. I'll leave that to others.

Anything in this that helps?

Regards,

Grazie
PDB wrote on 12/4/2003, 3:06 AM
Grazie,

Much appreciate the ideas! thanx! I think I'll give the slight blur a go and see how it works out...

And apologies for the little info I provided. Just to set the backround, this is a project I'm working on for a friend. Must say I do this only as a hobby so this is a sort of first serious "job" (too serious if you ask me but my friend inisited on me doing it...)
He is a major shareholder in a small pharmaceutical company. He knows my "obsession" with this hobby of mine (ie Video/photography) and asked me to shoot a presentation vid for a conference he is attending next week (we did the shoot about a month ago). The low light footage was actually shot on a different day by the 2nd cam "operator" = firend nº 2 and the one who actually volunteered to do this project in the first place! (used a sony consumer cam) and unfortunately the low light shots are poor in quality - no possibility of a re-shoot at this stage and that part of the video is apparently a "must have". Thats about it. The only good "side" is that my friend (the "client") can´t really complain - I told him that one thing is video as a hobby; and another very different kettle of fish is producing a professional quality presentation video - but that is no excuse as far as I'm concerned.
I'm actualy quite satisfied so far (even think the music I did in Acid is quite in line ) but this short part of the video (about 60" of a total of about 5.5 minutes) is a bit of a let down. I guess I could lower the quality of the rest so as to match the bad part and then it wouldnt stand out so much...maybe not!.

Thanks again for the suggestions. I will give it a go.

Cheers,

Paul.
Grazie wrote on 12/4/2003, 3:24 AM
Paul - Okay, you say the "other" cammie was No2. Is there any chance of using footage from No1 and intercut? We've all seen how this can be used in a dramatic way - tilting/angling the "poor" quality footage? Now if you could intersperse this low quality footage and use "other" cutaways, you could be onto something - yeah? Could be even better than you originally thought! Another thought is that you could "Video Wall" the speaker many talking heads . . oh yes another idea would be to stop frame a piece and have him reappear in the next part of the video wall allowing him to continue . . . .

Regards,

Grazie
TorS wrote on 12/4/2003, 3:32 AM
I'd like to turn Grazie's backdrop idea upside down. Twice.
1. Use something else as backdrop and cram the bad lot in a small PIP. Make the backdrop soft and dark so the important bits shine against it.
2. use the same video as backdrop, but soft and dark. Have the important bit as PIP like above.
Tor
Grazie wrote on 12/4/2003, 5:41 AM
Yasht! Neat idea Torsie . . . there's much to do to "make" something better from what there is. I used a P/C over some badly grained low light stuff. I "blew" the lighting on the background clip - almost washed-out - put the "good" bit middle & centre and it was terrific. Clients loved it! Ho . . .. ! Skin & Teeth comes to mind . .

Grazie
StormMarc wrote on 12/4/2003, 11:30 AM
Paul,

I use the virtual dub filter smart smoother (free on the net). It can be used in Vegas with the free Satish plugin. I get pretty good results with it. You have to be careful though as it sometimes gets ignored during renders. I always open it up before rendering to make sure it's set and that seems to solve the problem.

Marc
johnmeyer wrote on 12/4/2003, 11:53 AM
I have posted several months ago about steps I use to reduce noise on VHS video. Some of those steps, involving multiple captures, will not work with digital video (because each capture is identical). However, some of the noise filters will work with any video.

I have tried over a dozen VirtualDub and AVISynth temporal and spatial filters. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. The SpotRemover filter can do wonders, but you really have to be careful.

The one that I keep coming back to is the NRS Plugin v1.2 by Antonio Foranna. I only enable the Temporal Smoother, disabling all other controls. I check "Interlaced." I set Luminance thresholds to Dark (6) and Bright (10). At these settings the effect of the plugin is quite subtle.

As I've indicated in my previous posts, I also use a chroma filter for VHS because it contains so much chroma noise. The results of this are next to unbelievable.

If you want to see a restoration I did just yesterday, right click on this link and download the WMV file (1.8 Mbytes). I used the NRS and chroma filter on this prior to Vegas. Inside of Vegas, I used the secondary color corrector to reduce the saturation of a portion of the red channel (common problem in VHS because of where chroma is placed in the composite analog signal). I also used the color corrector so try to correct for some of the red color cast (on a computer monitor, the color still looks pretty weird; it looks much better on TV). Actually, since WMV encoding at low resolution does pixel averaging, you can't see how REALLY bad the original was. The difference on a TV monitor, where you can really see the chroma shimmering on the original, is absolutely stunning. However, you can get a general idea from the WMV file.

With any corrections, less is always better. That's why I didn't try to get rid of all of the color cast, and why I try to be subtle with the noise reduction.

VHS restoration example (WMV - 1.8 MBytes)

This link will stay up for at least a few weeks.