Remove grain

woolbrig wrote on 9/20/2008, 6:52 AM

I have some footage I shot with an XH A1 at 6db of gain. Is there a good way to remove or reduce the grain in the footage?

Comments

farss wrote on 9/20/2008, 7:03 AM

There's a price to pay doing any noise reduction.
Mike Crash's dynamic noise reduction has worked very well for me and it's free.

http://www.mikecrash.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6

If the noise is only in the blacks / darker areas of the frame you could try crushing the blacks a little using the Levels FX or Color Curves or even the basic Black Restore. Tiny amounts of the Median or Gaussian Blur FX will also reduce noise at the expense of reducing resolution.

Others seem to like a noise reduction plugin from Neat Video but I think it costs money and I've never used it myself.

Really the thing is if this was drop dead easy then it'd be done in the hardware of the camera, sorry to say.

Bob.

jabloomf1230 wrote on 9/20/2008, 8:25 AM

Neat Video works great. It has a lot of options, that sometimes are more confusing than helpful, but with tinkering, you can usually remove grain introduced by small amounts of electronic gain.

Bob, the newer Canon and Nikon DSLRs have vastly improved electronic gain circuitry, so I suspect we will be seeing that on camcorders at some point also.