Daze,

The answer is Visual Infinity's Grain Surgery. Among other things, it removes video noise and compression artifacts. But unfortunately it isn't available for Vegas. Perhaps we should agitate to get SoFo to incorporate compatibility with Premiere/After Effects plug-ins, so that applications like Grain Surgery would be usable with Vegas 4. For more info, see

http://www.visinf.com/gs/ae/

All is not lost. Vegas Video 3 does have video effects to deal with the problems you mention. If your footage is like mine, the Blue channel has the worst noise. Just expect an investment in processing time.

-- seeker --

Maybe you can get better result with one of Sonys dig 8 cams.
Just play the tape and you will get a digitized signal out of the camcorder.
I also agree with "seeker" that you can get a long way experimenting with lowering the blue color perhaps in combination with altering brightness and contrsast.
Aje

If you can't improve the look of this footage sufficiently in Vegas you might like to consider using the free VirtualDub program to pre-process your captured video before doing your editing, compositing, etc, in Vegas.

There are a number of free filters available for use with VirtualDub, in particular a number of noise reduction filters which can dramatically improve the speckly effect you mention.

I believe Satish (author of the excellent free 3DPluginPac for Vegas) was going to investigate whether it would be possible to write a "wrapper" plugin that would allow VirtualDub filters to be used directly in Vegas, but I think he's on a well deserved holiday at the moment so I don't know if he's been able to decide whether this is feasible yet.

You might try .002 or .001 gausian blur. It will help with the
grain but don't know about specles. Then after that try the unsharpen
filter.

James J. Kizak

Thanks for the fast feedback guys - Much appreciated. I'll have a play around with the things you suggest.

I've been looking at http://www.debugmode.com, home of the PluginPac you mention. I notice he has also created a Morph package (WinMorph). Does anyone know if it's any good? I've been looking for a good morphing solution for a while. Avid's Elastic Reality used to be one of the best (I think), but it seems to have disappeared. What's regarded as the best these days?

Thanks.

Grainy images are to be expected in low light, in any medium-(analog, hi-8,dv). You also might be seeing dropouts from your hi8 tape, which are more obvious in low light.I dont think you're going to find a magic fix for this, but good luck !