Not sure if this is 100% what you're looking for, but since Spot mentioned Virtual Dub, here is a link to work with the video noise: http://neuron2.net/LVG/vdplugins.html

Sure would be nice to somehow get Grain Surgery for use in Vegas.

... but is it really that good? Does it really do that much more than cinelook or the zenote grain stuff?
I know that dv Magazine didn't give grain surgery the best score and I personally have never seen fake grain that actually helped a video project pass for film.

I just spent the past ten hours doing analog video restoration. I am never quite satisfied with the result, so I keep fiddling.

My original approach was documented here:

My "ultimate" VHS tape restoration recipe

Please skip over all the stuff about multiple captures -- it is a great idea, and it really works, but it takes WAY too long for anything not destined for the national archives.

In that long thread, I eventually, near the bottom, in one of my last posts, get to the technique I now use. Quoting from myself:

"For most of my VHS restoration, I capture using the best possible deck, with the edit switch on (VERY important). If you have a TBC, use it. Once captured, I then use VirtualDub to copy the footage from my capture drive to my edit drive. I use (in this order) Giles Mouchard's Chroma Noise Reduction (luma wide 75.00% 15.98% chroma; Chroma 1 100%, 100% chroma; Chroma2 100%, 31.7% chroma; no chroma shift; and Noise Reduction Suite (NRS) 1.4 with only the Temporal Smoother enabled, and Dark Pixels set to 6 and Bright Pixels set to 10. Make sure you check the Interlaced box. This temporal filtering is subtle, but I cannot detect any filter-induced artifacts. I have gone up to twice these values on footage with little movement, and the filterning becomes quite good. However, on fast moving scenes the artifacts are way too noticeable and therefore you are better off doing less filtering. "

VirtualDub is great, but it works in RGB color space, and it takes a long time. AVISynth is another approach, but it is a little geekier to work with. The flip side is that it generally performs faster, and there are more things you can do with it. While I haven't found anything that does as subtle a job as NRS for the subtle noise, someone ported the Mouchard chroma plugin over to AVISynth. In addition, there is a nifty plugin called "Despot" that performs absolute magic on tape drop outs and the kind of interference you get from static and vacuum cleaners (those thin horizontal white specs that show up for one frame and then disappear). Here is my AVISynth script for cleaning analog sources. This one was optimized for transferring an old laserdisc to DVD:

#Serve RGB32 from Vegas. If going into Mainconcept MPEG encoder,

#convert back to RGB32 in this script. Check the RGB 16-235 box in the Mainconcept encoder.



AVISource("D:\Frameserver.avi")



loadplugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\despot.dll")

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



#Both plugins require color space conversion

converttoYV12(interlaced=true)

Cnr2("oxx",8,16,120,90,255,32,255,false)

DeSpot(p1=20,p2=8,pwidth=240,pheight=5,mthres=14,mwidth=20,mheight=15,interlaced=true,merode=43)

#converttoYUY2(interlaced=true)

ConvertToRGB32(interlaced=true)

Once you have AVISynth installed, you should also install Satish's framserver plugin for Vegas (available at www.debugmode.com). You can then framserve whatever you edited in Vegas into the AVISynth script. You then open the AVISynth script in the MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder, make sure you have the RGB 16-235 box checked, and away you go. Completely cleaned video, encoded to MPEG-2 directly, without any intermediate steps. I am currently running this script and it is cleaning and doing MPEG-2 encoding at about 1.5x real-time. Very impressive.

The RGB conversion was necessary because if I kept everything in YUV, the results got faded. I couldn't find a way around this, so I just converted back to RGB in the last step.

Sorry, it is very late, and I am rambling even more than usual ...

John,
interesting reading how you're going with this. Much of what you're doing is in my AVDC-300 I think. Temporal noise reduction is useful but it can intriduce ghosting on fast motion.
I fyou read my "Why Noise is Bad" post down below somehere, you'll hear about some interseting reading I did on a oiece if high end gear. Bsically even whne cost isn't a factor noise reduction eventually hits a wall, you end up doing more harm than good.
One really interesting thing I've noticed working with old prints is CC makes the grain fair less apparent. I'm sure it's all in the mind, when the color looks OK we forgive the other crap, but when the color is out everything else is noticed.

BTW other simple thing I've found can help in some situations with crud is Motion Blur but use with caution!

Bob.

Temporal noise reduction is useful but it can intriduce ghosting on fast motion.

Yup. That's why you can't use it much. However, there are some restoration tools that seem to have very little downside. The chroma denoiser, which is temporal, but works on color artifacts, has virtually no downside, unless you turn it all the way up. If you do that, really intense colors will leave a slight trail as the object moves. At normal settings this doesn't happen. VHS and 8mm have HUGE amounts of chroma noise, and this filter kills it.

The NRS filter I use with Virtualdub, is very subtle, and using the settings I recommended above, I have yet to see any ghosting or posturizing (the latter is more of a problem with spatial filters, but you can get it with temporal).

There are some filters for AVISynth that identify areas of the picture that are moving, and dynamically turn off temporal filtering on those portions of the picture (Pixiedust is one), and use spatial filtering on the portions that move, while using temporal filtering on the portions of the picture that remain stationary.. The theory is good, and many users report good results, but I still haven't gotten what I want.

The Despot filter, which I just used on a project for the first time yesterday, is pure magic. It is able to almost completely kill tape dropouts, with no discernable downside. Again, if you get carried away, and don't set the parameters correctly, you can get bad looking video, but with the settings I posted above, I didn't see one bad frame in 90 minutes of video.

Another filter that is magic is the delogo filter. Great for getting rid of date/time stamps some people leave turned on. The video isn't perfect, but it is darn good, and far more watchable.

I wish Sony would provide a mechanism to allow VirtualDub and AVISynth plugins to work within Vegas. I use Satish's Wax for VirtualDub plugins that only work on one frame at a time (like Delogo), but apparently the current plugin interface does not allow the external plugin to access more than one frame at a time. Obviously, temporal plugins need to look at two or more frames at a time in order to work their magic (some, such as motion stabilization, look at as many as a dozen).

Grain Surgey is amazing. Forget about the adding noise feature. That's useful if you want to match footage from various sources (it's not really for film look). Grain Surgery is amazing at removing the noise from grainy DV video while still keeping the detail in the picture. I haven't seen anything else that comes close. Sony really need to get hold of the (easily available from the creators) source code for it and integrate it into Vegas.

Someone wrote two noise reduction filters for Vegas available here http://mikecrash.wz.cz/vegas/vegas.htm

Grain Surgey is amazing.

Yes, but how do you use it for video? Isn't it for Photoshop (i.e., still photos)? And even when working on one frame, isn't it REALLY slow? I think there was a discussion about this about nine months ago, and no one could figure out how to use it for video. If there is a version for video, or if you know how to make it work for DV video, please let us know.

Thanks!

Someone wrote two noise reduction filters for Vegas available here

I missed these. They both look very useful. Thanks!

John, there was a Grain Surgery plugin for After Effects but is no longer sold since as of AE 6.6, Adobe bought the plugin and incorporated it into the software as a standard feature.
It was and is however, based on what I researched, a very slow process.

The neuron2 reference for Virtual Dub is, I think, the filter called "Smart Smoother." If so, it's the one I used quite a bit a few years ago. It works on the principle that adjacent pixels having only slight differences in value must be showing noise, so the values are averaged. Adjacent pixels having substantial value differences must represent objects in the picture, so they are left alone.

This works reasonably well, but has the subtle effect of reducing or eliminating the texture in large swaths of the image. If carried to an extreme, the image takes on the appearance of a cartoon, where large parts of the image are painted with with a common color.

One nice thing about using Mike Crash's smart smoother and DNR within Vegas , unlike when frame serve out to Virtual Dub, is you can keyframe their use.

Do google on mike crash as he has a new web page.

mike crash has a new web site for the vegas filters. mikecrash.com.

I love Mike Crash's plugins, his TV Out plugin gave us what only Vegas 7 will now, and his has been around since Vegas 4. His Smart Smoother and Dynamic Noise Reduction tool are pretty sweet too. I couldn't figure out how to use the Smart Deinterlace tool properly, but I assume it could be really useful (if I knew how to use it).

Here's a LINK to the Vegas filters.

Yes, but how do you use it for video? Isn't it for Photoshop (i.e., still photos)? And even when working on one frame, isn't it REALLY slow? I think there was a discussion about this about nine months ago, and no one could figure out how to use it for video. If there is a version for video, or if you know how to make it work for DV video, please let us know.
Noise Ninja does a slightly better job IMO, but it takes way too much button pushing to use.

For Grain Surgery in After Effects, you can use Satish's Frame Server to go out of Vegas into AE.

2- Smart Deinterlace:
see the following thread for instructions on setting it up
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/archive/index.php/t-52097.html

When you Vegas in a interlaced project, the filters operate on a single field. Which means that the filter can't de-interlace, it needs to see the fields but write to a FRAME.