Noise Correcting video with NO NOISE

[Tim Kolb]

Skin tones are usually the target of these types of actions. Boris Effects has a great effect called “Smooth Tone” which can be confined to specific values within the shot (like skin tones) and leave the rest alone…

I have no experience with Neat Video, so I don’t know how it is deployed.

It’s all a bit of “season to taste” really. What is a beautiful shot to one person is too contrasty to another. I find human faces with some signs of age to have much more interesting character than a “glamour shot” smooth almost ‘airbrushed’ look most of the time, but if Revlon is writing the check and the model has visible pores…it’s Smooth Tone to the rescue. “Real” has nothing to do with the deliverable for many projects…ever see the one with Halle Berry squinting as the VO talks about the harsh sun? (…and she’s obviously under a 12 by and is lit with nothing but super-soft creamy, wrapped light? She looks typically radiant, but it might have been a touch more convincing had they at least hit her with a hard HMI backlight.)

I also like Boris FX Smooth Tone for smoothing wrinkles in my collapsible green screen on location shots as I can confine the effect to the green/blue and it makes pulling the key easier as it’s very difficult to get a screen that’s been crunched in a ball to smooth out in a half hour on a shoot.

So…there are a few scenarios where you might want to “soften detail” on something as opposed to “suppress signal noise.”

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,