underexposed video

[Graham Bernard]

If you don’t do Levels first, how will you know how much you can de-grain in Neat Video?

I use Levels in conjunction with the Scopes.

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 and two elderly XM2s

[Matt Carlson]

This can be a tricky question and the answer, as with any complex problem, is it depends. Neat Video can reduce noise that the human eye does not detect at low levels so it is not truly necessary to identify the noise with the naked eye. Ultimately using Neat Video as the last plugin in a chain is ideal but sometimes when the footage is heavily noised the end result, to put it bluntly, needs to be pounded by a sledgehammer. Since Neat Video is actually a “morphing” algorithm the question becomes whether or not the “distortion” created by the plugin is useful to you by creating and wrangling dark colors in to a uniform whole to be manipulated later. In extremely low light heavy noise situations applying Neat Video first can have the end result be much more palatable although a huge amount of detail will be lost. Sometimes this is preferable if you plan to keep the end result fairly dark. The clearer the actual footage is in terms of detail (that is if the details are not overly destroyed by noise… the noise is just there) means you can do corrections first and use Neat Video second.

The overriding concern is how the clip will fit in to the rest of your composition. This will help you determine which way to go. Unfortunately Neat Video is absolutely fantastic at removing film grain but only pretty good at codec distortion which is what you are dealing with.

[Pete Baratta]

Thanks guys, the clip in question is a seperate 10 sec shot so doesn’t need to match a previous one, lighting wise. It’s mainly facials against dark backgrounds so I can concentrate on the skin tones mainly. Thanks again, Pete.