reduce excessive grain in a clip (FX help needed)

James-Honeycutt wrote on 1/23/2019, 11:49 AM

Hello....

I have a 4K clip of some movie film. This clip has excessive grain.  I wanted to know if a FX plug in to MS 15 would help to reduce this.  I saw Chroma Blur, and another effect called Gaussian Blur. Would one of them work?

I see that I can click on my clip in the time line and go to Event FX.  I see that I can select an effect, but I am unsure what to do after that.

Do I add the effect to my menu to choose from at a later date?  Or if I select an effect will it apply to the video on my time line?  To add the effect to my video, do I just render as usual?

I have not used any FX plug ins before and unsure how choose them and apply them.

Thanks

MS 15, build 157. Windows 10, all updates, Nvidia video, 32 GBs RAM, solid state hard drive, i7

 

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 1/23/2019, 12:49 PM

First of all, what size was the movie film? I don't know of any film format that would benefit from that much resolution, because as you said, you are encoding grain and noise in addition to the image. Bigger isn't better. Goes double for film.

For instance, the cleanest 35 mm movie film is already at or above perceptually optimal resolution at 1080p capture resolution, using conventional analog calculations.

That said, you might try the Grain or Film Tune in Handbrake, or NeatVideo.

KenB wrote on 1/25/2019, 8:02 PM

The only builtin FX in MS I can see that purports to reduce noise is Median. There are two presets: "Light noise reduction" and "Round noise reduction". But others have said it is not particularly good. If you really need to do this well, you are probably better off paying for a BCC plugin or NeatVideo to do it. (Actually, there is also the FX Saturation Adjust that has the preset "Reduce minor color noise".) It's easy to find available FXs in MS, just click on the Video FX tab and type in "noise" in the search box.

To add a video FX to a clip, click on the little fx icon in the top-right of the clip. Find the FX you want (Median is under VEGAS > Creative), select it and click OK. You will then see a dialog box where you can select a preset from the Preset dropdown list. (Another way to do all this which you may find easier is to click on the Video FX tab, find the FX you want, then drag one of the presets onto the clip.)

You might then want to select a small part of the clip and render that instead of the whole clip, so see how it looks.

Ken.

Vegas Pro 18.0 (Build 284)
OS: Windows 10 Pro 2004
CPU: Intel Core (4th gen) i7-4790 @ 3.60GHz (HD Graphics 4600 - driver 15.40.46.5144)
Memory: 32GB DDR3
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1660 SUPER - driver 452.06
Monitor: 1920x1080x32

Musicvid wrote on 1/25/2019, 8:39 PM

But others have said [Median] is not particularly good

It is quite good. And quite slow.

It is just not good for grainy film.

Neither usually are convolution kernel, NLMeans, or other low-block matrix filters for pretty much the same reason. They work at the pixel level, where grain does not live. And they're slow.

Noise "wash" and analog film grain are geometrically different. In that microcosm, the difference is that between fine sand and rocky asteroids

Thus, we have different tools for different jobs. Light denoise in Handbrake is also an option for less bit-intensive CRF encodes, in addition to the Tunes mentioned before.

 

James-Honeycutt wrote on 1/26/2019, 8:25 AM

To add a video FX to a clip, click on the little fx icon in the top-right of the clip. Find the FX you want (Median is under VEGAS > Creative), select it and click OK. You will then see a dialog box where you can select a preset from the Preset dropdown list. (Another way to do all this which you may find easier is to click on the Video FX tab, find the FX you want, then drag one of the presets onto the clip.)

Thanks so much. I get it now.

You might then want to select a small part of the clip and render that instead of the whole clip, so see how it looks.

Good idea. Thank you Ken.

mraroid