Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 7/5/2002, 10:26 AM
As of yet Vegas Video doesn't have any 'noise removal' filters at least not named as such. You can use Gaussian Blur at very low setting for smoothing. There's also Median which is more of a bluring filter, there's also quick and radial blur filters.
valnar wrote on 7/5/2002, 10:42 AM
Are there any plugins from 3rd party vendors? Or, do you know of a way to use VirtualDub and Vegas together??

Thank you for replying.

Robert
Chienworks wrote on 7/5/2002, 10:49 AM
Do whatever filtering you wish in VirtualDub first, save to new .avi files. Then load these files into Vegas.
valnar wrote on 7/5/2002, 10:54 AM
It's a 20GB file!
BillyBoy wrote on 7/5/2002, 11:20 AM
Welcome to the club. If you want to remove "noise" then you need to preprocess in VirtualDub. I know... a extra and long step. What kind of noise are you talking about and how severe?
valnar wrote on 7/5/2002, 11:22 AM
Not much noise. It's an original VHS tape. I may not even need to do it all, but improving the "copy" I make from the original certainly is worthwhile. I'm transferring VHS tapes to DVD-R and want to do very little altering of the source, but it figures that the ONE thing I want to do isn't in Vegas!

I don't plan on adding page swipes or fancy effects.

Robert
Clyde200 wrote on 7/5/2002, 1:34 PM
If there isn't 'much noise' you might consider just rendering with the Main Concept DVD template. I've just done what you are describing and the results are fantastic !
Chienworks wrote on 7/5/2002, 2:06 PM
MPEG rendering does a tiny amount of blurring in order to prepare the material for better compression. In particular, noise does not compress well at all. Simply rendering to MPEG may eliminate enough of the noise to suit your needs.
valnar wrote on 7/5/2002, 2:30 PM
Hmmm. I did think it looked pretty nice compared to the original AVI file.

Thanks!
BillyBoy wrote on 7/5/2002, 3:55 PM
The FX filters I mentioned will lessen, sometimes totally remove "noise" depending on how much filter you apply. Of course there is a trade off to smoothing, you're going to suffer some quality loss meaning the image will look softer.

You can recapture some of the cripness by applying the Unsharp Mask which works the same way as Photoshop's, in reverse to what its name suggests meaning it SHARPENS the endges, so just a badly named filter.

Like Chienworks said, just converting to MEPG will 'soften' (blur) the image a little, but there no real way of getting around it if you want to make a DVD. Changes are if you start off with good source material you'll be happy with how it is rendered with the default DV settings even without applying any filters.

Its kind of like those TV taste tests. If you show two files one DVD and one AVI to several people, most won't be able to tell which is which.
gbohn wrote on 7/8/2002, 2:08 PM
For what it's worth, I've been converting Hi8 camcorder 'home movies' to DVD. I've noticed that my camcorder produces 'noisey' video in low light.

To try and reduce this I use a Gaussian Blur of about 0.002x0.002 to 0.003x0.003 followed by a 'Sharpen' of about 0.6-0.8. (I can't remember why, but for some reason I thought the Sharpen worked out better than 'unsharp mask'.)

This takes the edge of the noise I've been seeing (but doesn't eliminate it altogether). A render to AVI sucks up about 18 hours/hour of source on my system though (P4 2.2 GHz).

As always, your mileage may vary.

-Greg Bohn