Grain Surgery for Noise Reduction

[Derek Hader]

I too would love to hear some responses to this post, as I have a bunch of footage shot by an amatuer who left the gain on in sunny outdoor conditions.

I need to use the footage, so any points on how to reduce the noise would be appreciated!

-Skeets

[Barend Onneweer]

Grain Surgery was acquired by Adobe and is now included in the Pro Version of AE: Match Grain, Remove Grain and Add Grain.

Works quite well, although processor intensive.

Bar3nd

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[Eric Goldstein]

Thanks for the Grain Surgery info. I’ve used the AE plug in extensively. It works as well as any noise reducer I’ve found. There’s always a trade off between reducing grain and keeping detail. The former Grain Surgery now AE plug in helps retain some detail by creating a map of lines from the image that it composites on top of the grain reduced image. This helps retain some detail, by adding an unsharp mask you can further retain detail. But, in heavy grain situations it can be a real battle to retain detail and an image that doesn’t look too plastic or unreal.

I’ve recently tried Algolith’s Algosuite. Their product has a good noise reducer and excellent anti-aliasing, but if you thought the Grain Surgery/AE plug-in had long renders, Algosuit makes their renders seem short by comparison. Also, Algosuite’s tools work almost exclusively on progressive frames, so you must de-interlace interlaced footage and re-interlace if you need the footage interlaced; all this makes render times even longer.

Algo suite also has excellent up rezzing (primarily, I think, because of its excellent anti-aliasing and frame conversion. However, I haven’t had good results from their frame rate conversion. The default settings for 60i to 24p resulted in very choppy motion. Their are controls, but with the long render times, finding the right settings has been difficult due to time constraints.

DV Film’s Maker provides excellent 60i to 24 conversion at the default settings, but doesn’t have the extensive de-noise, anti-aliasing and up rez capabilities as Algosuite. I’ve also tried Magic Bullet and its companion up rez software IHD. But Magic Bullet’s capabilities didn’t appear as great as Algosuite.

Regards,

Eric

Eric Goldstein
Giraffe Film Company
Los Angeles
eric@giraffefilm.com

[Steve Roberts]

One thing about Reduce Grain: be sure to turn on temporal filtering. It’s off by default probably because of its roots as a PS plugin — it should be on by default in AE, in my opinion.

(I used to demo Grain Surgery for the good folks there.)

The plugin analyzes the specific noise pattern of a source, then applies an algorithm to reduce the noise. Good plug.

[Eric Goldstein]

Thanks for the temporal filtering tip.

Eric

Eric Goldstein
Giraffe Film Company
Los Angeles
eric@giraffefilm.com