denoise and sharpen before or after RESOLVE

[Sascha Haber]

I don’t have a good feeling about the one giant Qt thing.
Tried that with a music video and it was lagging like hell.
You rather should use the consolidate function in FCP and export shots from the timeline, I say.
Denoising today should be handled by NeatVideo in FCP.
Then you Colorist can focus on grading.
Next month I might say something different 😉

A slice of color…

DaVinci 7.1.2 OSX 10.6.7
MacPro 5.1 2x 2,4 24GB
RAID0 8TB eSata 6TB
GTX 285 / GT 120
Extreme 3D+ WAVE

http://www.saschahaber.com

[Margus Voll]

If you can wait for version 8 then you get denoise that runs on cuda.

For what i have seen it seems really exiting.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Peter Chamberlain]

I feel it depends on the images and available time. Sometimes its good to NR prior to grading a clip so the qualifiers are not using noisy material. It can make the keys cleaner. Then again, NR of all the material prior to grading can un-necessarily soften the image at great expense of time and quality. Sometimes a little NR in dark sections of the image can make a previously unusable shot, perfectly ok and so I have seen NR applied in pre-edit previews to decide if a ‘take’ or scene is usable or not. Applying NR on all the material after the grade is often done on a time vs quality vs $$ basis and you can generally you can only pick two of this set at one time.

In 8.0 you can apply NR in a node, anywhere in the node graph; and qualify just a color, luminance or masked region to apply the NR. Performance is GPU based and we have been testing 2K realtime NR on our linux machines for a while now. Even the MacPro with dual CUDA GPUs can apply real time NR at HD res.

[Mikhail Puzyrev]

Never denoise or sharpen or VFX before grading. It kills color range. I always grade the shots for VFX guys first or ask them to wait for final version to render VFX shots. Also, often, denoise filters produce banding which will prevent You from grading the shot right way

[Andi Winter]

i find the best tool for sharpening is inside resolve! before i had resolve i also did it in fcp but i found out that the blur tool used negativ also does a really nice job in sharpening. and it is realtime and node based, so sharpening only the eyes of an actor or face with a moving, soft power-window does give me nice results.
(the only problem can occur if the material is really grainy, then you cant do much because of the sharpening of the grain)

i do also hope in v8 the denoiser can make my job easier in the near future… 🙂

[Tom Gomez]

Thanks so much gents!!! The more I learn about this coloring process the more pumped I get. Sounds like Resolve 8 may be able to do my sharpening and nr for me… which seems ideal.

Couple last finishing questions…

My FCP timeline is in ProRes 4444. Should I have the colorist give me ProRes as my super final final video file? And then from there go to MXF (for very small theatrical run in digital theaters), whatever formats tv stations want (will probably air on syfy), and of course DVD and BluRay… Or should I get a different format from the colorist as my super duper master file? Or should my FCP timeline itself be in a different format?

I’m guessing we’ll be mastering to the rec 709 spec… Are there things I should know about that spec? Different versions of it for different exhibition purposes?

When I did a test in a nice digital theater (just plugged in DVI to the giant projector) it looked amazing. Can’t wait to see what it looks like after it goes thru resolve.

thanks again,

Tom

PS. What’s a coda in resolve? 🙂

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[Charles Haine]

For right now, I would say get a ProRes444 back from your Colorist and call that your “master” file from which to make MXF, Blu-Ray, and tape formats for the networks.

There are less compressed codecs than ProRes Quattro (as the kids call it), such as Kona or even Uncompressed, but none of them will play on most Mac Pro edit machines (due to hard drive speed as much as processor speed), so it’ll be very hard to QC (Quality Control) the grade.

After all, you’ll want to watch the project in realtime after it’s delivered to make sure it all came out okay.

In the meantime, regarding your “whats the coda” question, did you mean codec or CUDA?

Cuda is technology by NVIDIA that makes GPU accelerated processing easier; it’s the tech that was required for Resolve 7 and allowed Resolve on a mac to begin with. However, due to OpenCL (we think) Resolve 8 won’t require CUDA enabled NVIDIA cards and wll run on ATI as well.

If it was Codec, there is no native Codec for Da Vinci Resolve; it’ll read and write anything your Mac can read or write.

Also, I agree with everyone else; grade first, noise reduction later. The only exception might be something like a telecine suite where you have footage coming directly from a TK that you want to pipe through a hardware NR box before heading into your color corrector, but other than that, always grade first.

good luck,
Charles

Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com

[Tom Gomez]

Great advice everyone. THANKS VERY MUCH!!!

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[Margus Voll]

One have to know that ATI has its limitations in speed and resolution.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Jake Blackstone]

Totally wrong advice.
If you use proper tools, NR will not affect color range at all.
ALWAYS use NR BEFORE grading. Your keys will thank you and you’ll be able to push your images a bit farther.
Said that, I’m a bit impartial, as I use FilmMaster, which features one of the best Degraining and NR tools in the business-Clarity. If you’d like to know what a world class NR looks like, visit an upcoming Red Users meeting on June 11th and see it for yourself. There will be a demo of FilmMaster grading Open EXR images.