Eliminating graininess due to low light

Hi everyone, just looking for a potential way to best smoothen out or eliminate the graininess of shots due to low-light...filters, software etc. I looked in the FCP FAQ and someone mentioned Grain Surgeon, it however seems to be for photoshop.
-Al Werj

You can look for another way to brighten the shot. Lyric Media's free Shadow-Highlight filter does a good job brightening without too much graininess. Also look at the various suggestions in the FAQ:

[www.lafcpug.org]

As far as I know, aside from alternate ways of brightening, graininess when you have to do too much post-production brightening is just a fact of life.


www.derekmok.com

Can we assume the project is bright enough as is? The poster didn't complain of dark video, just grain.

Koz

Graininess due to low light, in the digital world, is simply noise. Nattress's Big Box of Tricks has some noise reducers that might work for you. The tradeoff is somewhat reduced sharpness, although he has built some compensation for that into these tools.

Scott

Thanks for the replies guys, yes the picture seems bright enough. I shot the video on a sony a1U with auto exp. set. Although the image is bright enough (on a broadcast monitor), it seems the aperture was starved for light.
-Al

The best, or I should say least worst way to suppress grain in a video signal is to compare two frames of video and eliminate everything that's radically different. Grain and video noise are usually totally different frame to frame, whereas the actual show, unless you're shooting an action movie, changes very little.

That gives you a slider with Good Action on one end and Eliminate Noise at the other. You can't have both at once. If you use too much reduction, you get the Video Conferencing effect, where the picture slowly builds itself after a major scene change. But it does it really quietly. If you shot with a hand-held camera, this isn't going to work at all.

You can try straight video filters, high slope, high cut, but the success rate of those is usually terrible. They just make the picture look soft or weird. It's usually better to just leave the noise alone.

Video noise has the same characteristics as audio noise. You can't get rid of it there, either for a lot of the same reasons. It looks (sounds) too much like the show.

Koz

In the future, make sure you don't set the camera to "auto gain". It will use the gain to compensate for light levels rather than the iris. Auto iris, while also not great, is sometimes necessary on handycams and always preferable to auto-gain.

There's this recent release product

[www.lafcpug.org]

I haven't used it, so don;t know how good it is.

I have used the pro airbrush from this kit [www.thegradingsweet.com] to great advantage smoothing out some noise in particular colours in a DVCAM colour job. Very nice to be able to control just the one colour, and it is stackable, so you can do each section individually.

Does anyone else have any comments on using Natress's Big Box of Tricks for this problem?...Is it Good, Decent, Worth the money?...for noise reduction/image improvement?
-Al

Hi,

I recommend running your footage through a Teranex or Teranex Mini.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

Thanks Mitch, that's a little over budget for me. I did however get Natress's Big Box of Tricks and Film Effects but the Noise Reduction Filters don't really work for the type of grain that I'm encountering. Is there another filter I should be using from Natress's Big Box of Tricks or Film Effects?
-Al

Graeme Nattress is very accommodating with questions and has even been known to do some special coding to solve his customers' problems. Write to him at graeme@nattress.com and he'll probably set you straight with the Box of Tricks.

Scott

Hi,

If you can find someone with a Teranex or better yet a Mini it might be affordable to pay someone to run your finished program through a Teranex. I paid something like $150 per hour for one hour to run some footage through a Mini.

Best Wishes,

Mitch