Increasing gain without increasing artifacts/grain on DV footage.

[Ace Billet]

Well I know what you mean by “artifacts”, I had this in a footage where I really pushed hard
on the shadows, I got those ugly blocks all over the place.

I find SA Color Finesse to be a very useful color corrector. plus you have a lot of different tools
that FCP lacks (curves)
It comes free with After Effects 6.5 and they also have a version for FCP.

cheers
ace

Intel Inside, the world’s most popular warning label.

[Bryce Whiteside]

Lyric Final Cut Pro Plugins
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/index.htm

Look for Shadow-Highlight plugin filter at the bottom of the page.
Website quote:
“Lyric’s free Shadow-Highlight plugin filter provides functionality similar to the Highlight/Shadow function in Photoshop CS, revealing detail in under or overexposed footage by lifting shadows or reducing highlights. In the following before-and-after example, details in both the shadows and the highlights have been recovered.”

Haven’t tried it so this isn’t an endorsement, but it is free.

HTH,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Tony]

Chris,

It a real simple formula when dealing with dv and 4:1:1. GIGO (garbage in garbage out).

One trick you can try to hide the grain is to undersaturate the image by taking down the chroma but you might find you have to suck too much out to hide the grain.

Tony Salgado

[Don Greening]

I tried the free plugin from Lyric and it works just like its description says, but it doesn’t do anything about improving picture noise/grain. But it doesn’t advertise that it fixes picture noise, either. For a freebie it’s great.

– Don