How to reduce digital video noise?

UFP wrote on 1/23/2005, 5:17 AM

I am wondering how I can reduce digital video noise. Espacially when there is not enough light you see a lot of noise 'pixels'. Maybe there is some kinda plugin for reducing noise? I tried blurring it a bit, but that is obviously not a good alternative...

I have a Sony TRV19E DV, and Sony Vegas 5

What is the best way to reduce digital video noise ?

Comments

farss wrote on 1/23/2005, 5:28 AM

To state the obvious, start with a better camera!
Bigger lenses gather more light and bigger CCDs make better use of it. Also shooting as wide as possible helps.
Beyond that there's a number of things you can try. You can use the color curves to crush the blacks a bit, that'll help. Also a TINY amount of the median filter will help. There's a few other 3rd party plugins that target noise and also a number of filters for Virtual Dub that I believe are pretty good and they're free.
If you're putting your video on DVD getting rid of noise is pretty important as any form of temporal encoding makes it look worse.
Bob.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/23/2005, 7:51 AM

I use the Dynamic Noise Reduction filter in VirtualDub. It works pretty well for this kind of noise. (I have to deal with this every year when my son sings in the Christmas choir. He is always in the darkest section of the stage :( )There is a plug-in of it for Vegas that Mike Crash ported (Thank’s BIG TIME Mike!). Look in the Vegas Filters section of his web site.

~jr

Spot|DSE wrote on 1/23/2005, 11:28 AM

Don't forget the Media filter in Vegas. Very slow, but it works great. Add to that, the Black Restore set to the Streaming preset.