Stabilize before or after other corrections?

TeetimeNC wrote on 8/8/2006, 7:18 AM

I have some low light footage which needs noise removal, color correction, and stabilization. I'm using Vegas for the noise and color correction, and After Effects for stabilization. Would it be better to do the stabilization before or after the other two operations?

Thanks,

Jerry

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 8/8/2006, 8:31 AM

Whichever works better for your workflow. I don't think the quality will be any different either way.

Stuart Robinson wrote on 8/8/2006, 9:19 AM

Personally, I'd do the stabilisation before noise reduction. Most de-noise algorithms look for moving, seemingly random pixels and apply temporal smoothing, so if your footage is jumping up and down that will make it much harder for the software to determine what is and what isn't noise.

johnmeyer wrote on 8/8/2006, 10:02 AM

Good point.

If you want to look into much better noise reduction than can be done in Vegas, take a look at this thread:

AVISynth VHS Denoise Scripts

The simplest AVISynth script for denoise is this one:

#This is the "ultimate everyday" script as of the date this was last saved. 



#Serve YUY2 from Vegas and convert back to RGB32 in this script if going into Mainconcept MPEG encoder.

#Check the RGB 16-235 box in the Mainconcept encoder.



loadPlugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\CNR\Cnr2.dll")

loadPlugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\fft3dfilter.dll")



#Modify this to point to the video file you use.

source=(AVISource("D:\Frameserver.avi"))



chroma=source.Cnr2("oxx",8,16,191,100,255,32,255,false)

final=chroma.fft3dfilter(sigma=2, plane=0, sharpen=1, interlaced=true)



#Stackvertical(source,final)



return final

If you are denoising DV, you can get rid of the CNR filter, and you can use an even lower sigma, like 1 or 1.5.

TeetimeNC wrote on 8/8/2006, 12:11 PM

Good point Stuart. It also occurred to me that it is much more likely that I would have to redo color correction or noise reduction, than it is the stabilization. So from this standpoint also, it is better to stabilize first.

Jerry