It isn't hard at all. You do need to install VirtualDub first and then if you want more VitrualDub filters in that application's plug-in folder. Do a web search (on a rainy afternoon) they are all over the place on the web) and there are scores of them, some better than others.

Personally I don't care much for frame serving itself, but Satish's as usual came up with a neat little app. Case in point if you use any VirtualDub filter by frame serving from Vegas it actually takes LONGER than if you would pre process before bringing your file into Vegas. In other words all the VirtualDub filters run FASTER, (much faster in my experince) if done directly from VirtualDub (save as AVI) then continue doing your thing in Vegas.

If you h aven't tried VirtualDub, do yourself a favor and dowload it. It too is a nifty little program and its free. Its main strength is in its filtering which are mostly of the clean up and noise (video) removal type. It can do many other things too, but heck yoiu already got Vegas which is the BEST editor.

I got to try to stop doing 3 or 4 things at once....

Smart Smoother is a add-on filter for VirtualDub

http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/smooth.html

Above gives an example of what it can do... and can't.

Slightly OT, but for anyone doing noise removal in Premiere, check out Vixen. I would love to see something like this ported to Vegas or added by SOFO for Vegas 5. I re-installed Premiere just to get at this plug-in, and frameserved back to Vegas.

The strongest feature is temporal noise checking, where it compares consecutive frames for for signs of noise, rather than simply blurring each frame. It retains all the sharpness of the original image, is fast, and is infinitely tweakable.

Looks like something a knob twister like me would like. :-)

Thanks Billy Boy. I'm trying it out right now on some bad wedding footage.

Marc

Great. :) Thanks for letting me know.

Doesn't "Quick Blur" do the same thing in Vegas?
John

> If you h aven't tried VirtualDub, do yourself a favor and dowload it.

Gotta second BillBoy’s recommendation here. VirtualDub has done some great stuff with noisy lowlight videos for me. It’s like a Swiss army knife for video.

> check out Vixen. I would love to see something like this ported to Vegas ...The strongest feature is temporal noise checking

VirtualDub has a built-in temporal smoother that performs an adaptive smooth along the time axis, and Jim Casaburi has written a Temporal Cleaner plug-in that reduces changes across frames without blending motion. I’ve used both with good success. These might do what Vixen does.

~jr

craftech: The whole trick is to somehow take out "noise" without removing "detail." The question is, what is noise and what is detail? The blurring filters just hack away and all the high-frequency stuff, which includes both. From what I can tell, SmartSmoother is a bit more refined in that it takes away the high-frequency stuff in regions that otherwise lack detail, but doesn't have much effect on the details of the image. It does this by saying, "Okay, any pixel-to-pixel variations below a certain amount is video noise, and I will smooth all that stuff out. Any pixel-to-pixel variations above that amount isn't noise, it's image details, and I leave that stuff alone." All I can say is that it seems to work without screwing up the "sharpness" much.

The default settings seem to work best for me. I tried boosting the settings to see how it changed things. The result: video that had broad areas of one color (like in a cartoon), yet little improvement in the Q (quantization) factor in the MPEG2 encoder results.

Of course, the best bet is to use a higher-quality camera at the source to minimize the noise in the first place, but for now I'm stuck with my little TRV8, a fine little camera in most respects.