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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
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
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
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.
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
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