Every once in a while you come across a product that just works, and works well. Neat video noise reduction is one of them. It comes in the form of a plugin for all of the most popular editing and motion graphics packages including After Effets, FCPX, Premier, and FCP7. The results are astonishing and, it can totally save a shot that you might have thought unusable. The results come at a price though. Dropping this filter onto your footage adds an age to render time.
Useage-wise, the software is fairly straight forward. All you need to do is open up the settings dialogue box, select a noise sample area, press auto and then apply. There are additional options available to tune-in the amount of luminance and chrominance reduction, along with a sharpening setting, but I have always been happy with the results that the auto settings provide.
Vimeo’s compression adds some banding, but you can still see from the sample below, the results are pretty good. Noise is reduced, while still managing to maintain small details.
I have recently been working on a time-lapse project at 4k resolution and this plugin has totally saved some shots. Details in skys such as stars are still retained while totally fixing the rest of the image.
I should note that I am not connected with the guys at Neat Video in any way. Just thought i’d share a product that works well.
http://vimeo.com/46310496
