Everything you NEED to know about Noise Reduction in DaVinci Resolve

hello and you are very welcome back to film resolve the channel where you can learn filmmaking techniques and how to pull them all together in davinci resolve today we're going to be talking about noise reduction which is also commonly referred to as noise removal or denoising we're going to be talking about luminois versus chromos what they are and how to identify them then we're going to cover my recommended workflow to achieve the best results and then we're going to break down each of the noise reduction settings including the differences between temporal and spatial noise reduction it's important to note that this is a feature of the studio or paid version of resolve so if you're on the free version you can still follow along and learn these fundamentals but you will have a watermark on your footage this episode is intended to suit all skill levels so feel free to check the notes below for timestamps and skip any sections that you're already comfortable with and as always the best way that you can help this channel and give back a little is to give this video a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and the notification bell but with that out of the way let's jump into it [Music] so it's important to note i think that if you're going to go zooming way in on in pretty much any shot you're going to notice artifacts especially noise so note that i'm only zooming in really far here not because i'm pixel peeping but because i want to make sure that you at home over youtube compression are still able to see what i'm talking about and with this shot if i go full screen i can promise you that under the amount of natural compression that is within the footage itself and before youtube compression i can see everything that i'm about to zoom in and point out to you so it is definitely present even at normal viewing distances and that's ultimately what you'll want to judge things off of so just know that i'm not being a pixel peeper here it is present without zooming way in i just want to ensure that you can still see the loom and chrome noise and be able to identify them so there's four little areas of this shot i want to show you as being problematic so i'm going to start zooming in onto the ipad here and we'll start playing through the footage and here is a really good example of more on the luma side and so like i said quite fine grain uh quite filmic-like i.e type of grain you would have seen on film before digital came around and not nearly as problematic it's worth noting there is some chroma noise in there too but the majority of this what you're looking at right now would be luminois that small grainy not saturated with any kind of color noise next if we just come up a little bit here we can see that there is a fair bit of luma noise as well but here you can really see really bad chrome noise so look at this red quite saturated like magenta shifted large blocks of gunky digital crap that is a really harsh example of chroma noise so next if i come up to our skin tones always an area worth checking out um now there's no point playing through here to show the pattern because my face moves all over the place and we'll just lose immediately but you can see if i zoom in here you can see these humongous chunks of chroma noise again these massive magenta shifted ones as well as here i'm outlining quite a large chunk of more greeny chroma noise and as well as of course some luminoids but not too bad in this area i'll attempt to play through a little you might see it dance rain but of course i'm going to be moving and that's going to make it a bit more difficult but you can see there's quite a lot of crap going on there the next kind of problematic area i think we're looking at is if i zoom in here in the shadows of the monitor here you can see a lot of the luminois as well as a decent behavior but here you can see quite a lot of chrome noise again quite magenta blocks going on here and you can see that dancing around really really aggressively we got a lot of greeny blocks going on too that's probably as a result of that green gradient from the light in the background though and then lastly if i come over to this right corner we get another really good example of chrome noise this is areas particularly bad for both green and magenta shifted chrome noise look how large those blocks of chrome noise is this corner is pretty much all chrome noise with some luma on top and it says alternating between green shifted chrome noise and magenta shifted chroma noise look how blocky all this is when i press play you can see just how aggressive large and blocky that noise is so again just to reiterate to really hit at home rule of thumb of course but in general luminois tends to look quite quote-unquote filmic in the sense that it's quite small fine grain that you would find on film and then chrome noise tends to be quite undesirable because it's very much so an artifact of digital video signal and it's large aggressive blocky chunks of noise that tend to have a saturation towards green and magenta now let's talk about actually navigating to uranoise reduction setting so this is typically part of the color grade so that's why we go to the color page to find these settings and along the bottom left panel here you have several options and this last one here is called motion effects so if we open up our motion effects that will reveal our temporal noise reduction settings our spatial noise reduction settings as well as some motion blur settings which are of course going to be ignoring and before we jump into what each of these settings do i'm going to first share with you my first two top tips for my noise reduction workflow my first tip applies mostly to when you're working with full-blown log clips but definitely applies to any kind of flattened picture profile footage you might be working with so it depends on just how much it is you need to apply and that first tip is to make sure you get your image to at least a healthy working place in terms of saturation and contrast so in my case i have a full-blown log clip this is s-log 3 and s-gammut3.cine now you might go about using a full-blown conversion lot like i am you might use color space transform or you might just use some quick primary adjustment nodes and settings such as contrast pivot saturation maybe you use your wheels maybe you use some curves whatever you might do that manually but just get it to a healthy working place in terms of saturation and contrast and the reason for this is because this will really show how much noise is in your image because the noise especially the chroma noise which is far more undesirable can often hide in the flatness so again we're getting a bit pixel pp here but will this show the point if i zoom right into this very problematic area in our skin tones and i toggle on and off this node that got us to a healthy working place in terms of saturation and contrast you can see just how much noise hides when we are in this flattened look and once i get some decent saturation and contrast in there you can see how much of that noise gets kicked up it's not adding noise it's simply exploiting how much noise is in the image and it's the same with any of these other areas that we identified just previously as problematic areas every single area gets exacerbated and really exploits just how much noise is in the image lastly this corner here was very problematic so i just want to show this corner too not looking too bad especially on the chroma side it's not looking very bad we can still see the luma side of things pretty well but once we get that conversion lot on there that really exploits how much noise we have to deal with in the shot so that's my kind of first key tip in my noise reduction workflow is to make sure that you are in a good working space at the very least to begin with my second key tip to your noise reduction workflow and this isn't really my key tip this is a general key tip that it wouldn't have taken you long to discover and that is that you want to make sure you do your noise reduction on the very first node of your node tree so you want to make sure you have a node before this that you do those noise reduction settings on it should always be the first node in your node tree and if for example you are already several nodes into a grade and you're quite far in and you decide okay now i need to go doing noise reduction rather than adding a node and doing reconnecting the best way to do it is to add a serial node before quote quote current node so you want to make sure that you select the first node in your tree as it is now ie the current node and use the keyboard shortcut shift s will add a serial node before the current node and now you can apply your noise reduction to that node alternatively you can click on the first current node right click add node add serial before we'll do the same thing and lastly clicking on that first current node of the tree coming up to color and nodes and you see add serial node before current is available there as well and then you can go doing your your noise reduction on that now me personally i typically straight away on any grade will just add a second serial node leave the first one free and begin working on that second node onwards and always have that first node there but like i said if you're several nodes into a grade already and you now need to go and add a node at the start that's the best way to do it and that is my second key tip in the noise reduction workflow and that is to make sure you do your noise reduction on the very first node in your node tree now let's break down all these settings that are available to us in resolve for noise reduction and we're going to start with a very broad look at the main differences between temporal noise reduction and spatial noise reduction and this is somewhat paraphrased not very kind of technical lingo going on here but in short temporal noise reduction will mean that resolve will look at multiple frames in order to try to figure out the noise pattern because the name of the game with noise reduction is figuring out what is noise and what you want to remove and what is detail and what you want to keep so temporal noise reduction will look at multiple frames to kind of generate and learn what the noise pattern is so it can take an educated guess on what to remove spatial noise reduction on the other hand will look at a single frame and we'll look at a group of pixels or a single pixel and look at surrounding pixels in an area and use that little patch to learn what the noise pattern is and it uses that method to then distinguish what is noise what is detail what to remove what to keep and again that's just kind of paraphrasing the difference one looks at multiple frames to learn what noise is and one looks at a single frame and a kind of an area within that frame and just how big the area is depends on your settings and that's how it will go about figuring out what is noise and what's detail what to remove and what to keep so with that kind of broad explanation of the key difference between temporal and spatial noise reduction let's jump more deeply into the individual settings of temporal noise reduction and then we'll do the same for spatial later on the first setting available to us in temporal noise reduction is frames and as i just mentioned temporal noise reduction uses a method in which it looks at multiple frames to try to figure out what the noise pattern is so this setting determines just how many frames is resolved going to look at for a given frame that's actually trying to render for try figure out noise from detail and therefore to try to remove the noise now the first rule of thumb you need to understand with frames is the lower the number the less processing power is going to be needed the higher the number the more processing power is going to be needed and that's because for a given frame that resolve is trying to render it now has to look at whatever amount of frames you've told it to to now generate that one frame so it has to do five frame analysis to figure out one frame or only a one frame analysis to try to figure out one frame so this greatly increases processing power and of course your render times so that's the first rule of thumb you need to understand when setting frames the second rule of thumb that you need to understand when setting your frames is that lower numbers yield less accurate results and higher numbers typically yield more accurate results but not necessarily always so a good rule of thumb here is to set it to middle of the road to three and you might need to go and tweak this depending on the type of motion that's in your shot because with temporal noise reduction you have to be very careful that you don't accidentally introduce motion artifacts and that's why a lot of these settings are doing is trying to mitigate the risk of motion artifacts depending on your shot so i'm pretty much quoting the manual on this one and the word may is very important here just because you've set a number of five doesn't necessarily mean the best results for a given shot and the rule of thumb is a value of one a lower value may yield better results with fast moving objects or a fast moving scene and a value of five may yield better results with a slow slower moving object or a slower moving scene so my typical workflow would be setting this to the middle of the road three and if i'm not seeing any egregious motion artifacts then i don't think about it any further and only if i do see motion artifacts will i go tweaking from there and of course once we actually come off of the setting of zero because we're not doing any frame analysis and therefore there is no temporal noise reduction once we come away from the value of zero we now have the rest of the options open up and become available to us next up on my screen it's down as mo s type which in full is motion estimate type and pretty self-explanatory this is the way in which resolve would go estimating the motion in your shot so it can do a better job of doing its noise reduction as well as mitigating motion artifacts and the rule of thumb is the lower the setting the less processor intensive but the less accurate it will be the higher the setting the more processor intensive but the more accurate results will be and we really only have two options faster and better none obviously completely bypasses it and i would typically avoid setting this to none because that means your entire image will get affected by the amount of noise reduction you apply later on and that is one of the quickest ways to achieve detail loss that wasn't necessary so again as always military setting is a great place to start and then seeing where you need to go from there once you kind of have everything or first pass in place and even though in the stack faster is at the top faster is the kind of mill of the road the order really is none faster better so typically i'll start by setting this to faster i'll move forward get the rest of the settings in place and see what i need to start tweaking from there next up we have the motion range option and this is a chance for us to get a little bit more efficient with resolve as well as increase accuracy because the thing about a noise in an image is if an item or the shot itself is quite uh you know kinetic there's a lot of motion in it yes there will be noise in those you know moving pixels but it's really hard for the eye to detect it because it's you know it's moving frantically we kind of accidentally saw that as an example when we zoomed way into my face to see the noise there it was really hard to see the noise when it was in motion whereas we when we analyze a static part of the image it's really easy for the eye to pick up on what is noise and what is not and that's where motion range comes in because if we come to the option to be a small medium and large and if we set this too small we're telling resolve that there's very little motion in this shot so you're going to probably need to include way more pixels to be reduced their noise and you know that's going to be more processor intensive because more of the image is going to get processed if we set it to large we are telling resolve that there is a lot of motion in this shot so that you're not going to have to include quite as many pixels and depending on the shot this could be a 50 difference in how many pixels get included in the noise reduction that you later apply so while we can increase accuracy this can also greatly increase um efficiency so small will be more processor intensive and large will be less processor and processor intensive and as always medium though is a great place to start see what the results are like and you can tweak from there later on and it's really important to note that this motion range option is greatly linked in with this motion threshold option which you would typically set later on but because they're so closely linked i'm going to explain that next and then we'll come back to these previous two settings so this motion threshold setting is essentially a definitive hard cut off point that you can tell resolve to consider what is in motion and what is not in motion and is static and if it's in motion it won't get the temporal noise reduction applied to it and if it is static or not in motion it will receive the temporal noise reduction so you can greatly affect what is reduced and what is not reduced with this setting now typically again common rule here middle of the road is a great place to start if you set this motion threshold to zero everything is omitted from you know the temporal noise reduction there will be no noise reduction applied whatsoever and if you set this to 100 the entire frame every last pixel will get the noise reduction applied and again is a very quick way to get detail loss so starting in the middle of the road and unless you notice any egregious artifacts leaving it there will nearly always be fine and then depending on the shot of course you may need to go tweaking from there so with that covered let's jump back to the rest of the temporal threshold settings with the luma and chroma options so now that we've gone and told resolve how to analyze the noise and how to distinguish noise from detail we now need to actually apply the noise reduction and you can see with these two sliders we can do that for both the luma and the chroma noise that might be present in your shot when these are set to zero there is absolutely no noise reduction being applied to your shot and when they're set to 100 that is the maximum amount of noise reduction that can be applied to your shot now there is a rule of thumb and a balancing act you always need to keep in mind when applying noise reduction both temporal and spatial and that is the more noise reduction you apply the more detail you can lose in your shot and that manifests itself in the form of less sharp images or a softer image so you can see here when set to 100 that the shot has gotten a bit softer and i if i bring them all the way back down to zero we get the natural amount of sharpness in our image back that's our default sharpness in our image so you always want to keep that in mind now you can see that these two sliders are linked currently and that's because of this little link icon here is currently toggled on so if you need to adjust the luma and the chroma noise reduction separately and attack the two different amounts of noise with different values you can just click on that you can see it's now unlinked and you can now go about adjusting these sliders independently to better suit your footage now in my case i typically leave it linked we might just have a value of 10 for now and then lastly we have this blend option and you can consider this to be the global adjustment of this entire temporal noise reduction effect and it's a little bit clunky in that zero the value 0 means 100 of the effect is taking place and if i set it to 100 then none of the effect is taking place so for example if i want 80 of the effect 8 0 to take place we need to set this to 20 to leave 80 percent of the effect to you know shine through and take place like i said a little bit clunky but that's how it works and now you know so there's an overarching point i want to get across with spatial noise reduction before actually diving into those individual settings and that is that you can consider spatial noise reduction to be kind of the sidekick to temporal noise reduction and that means you will want to do temporal noise reduction first and whatever noise is left behind after doing that you will then want to try attack with spatial noise reduction so it will follow up and kind of build upon your temporal noise reduction so let's actually jump into the settings starting with mode we have three options faster better and enhanced and these are three different algorithms of how resolve will go by analyzing the footage and there's increasing levels of a processing power and b accuracy so faster is quite processor friendly uh but not very accurate better will be a bit more intensive on your processing power but will yield more accurate results and then enhance is highly processor intensive and computing power intensive but is extremely accurate so that's the trade-off as always but these are tightly linked to your spatial threshold noise reduction settings of luma and chroma so basically if you're in the low end for these settings anywhere between 0 and 33 ish you will probably be okay with faster if you go from the mid range above about 33 to 66 you're probably going to want to go with better and if you go above 66 into the high range so 66 to about 100 you are going to want to probably go with enhanced as always you're probably going to want to check and see what yields the best results but those are the rules of thumb next up then is radius now admittedly the radius setting is a bit of a gray area in the manual in that it doesn't actually explain what it does just kind of goes straight into giving some recommendations so my explanation is a bit of an educated guess and is to be taken with a grain of salt so i reckon what radius is is just how large an area resolve looks at within the frame to analyze the noise pattern so we can learn what is noise and what is detail what to remove and what leave behind and back into the realm of what is definite is that small medium and large small is a small radius so it is less processor intensive but not as accurate and as we go up we get more processor intensive and more accurate however setting it to large doesn't necessarily mean you'll get better results because they do tie in very much so with the spatial threshold noise reduction setting that you set for your luma and chroma down below so very much operate like the mode does in that if you're in the lower range of these two settings then small will probably be the best setting for you if you start slipping into higher numbers here you might want to bunk that up to medium and if you go very high on these numbers down here you will probably want to go with large but ultimately it's a matter of just seeing what you end up with down here and then you'll come back and kind of set your mode and radius now we're back to applying just how much denoising will take place and it's the exact same as before we can attack luminois and we can attack the chroma noise zero is no noise reduction 100 is maximum noise reduction they are by default linked and we can unlink them by clicking on the little chain icon and adjust the luma and chroma values separately typically i do find myself avoiding the use of luma noise reduction in the spatial column because it's a very quick way of getting detail loss and i'll talk about that a little bit more down line and for now i'll give this a chroma value of 10 and i'm just going to zoom in and just to really hit home on the concept i talked earlier about spatial noise reduction should just be finishing off what your temporal noise reduction couldn't handle so if i turn chroma back down to zero so we're currently doing no spatial noise reduction and of course i'm zooming way in here in pixel peeping we can see we definitely have some chroma noise left behind from our temporal noise reduction and this is typically what what i do with spatial noise reduction is i unlink and give it that extra bit of chrome noise reduction because there always seems to be some lingering around so if i set that to a value of 10 we can see that last little bit of chroma noise reduction has the edge taken off of it so that's a very typical way in which i'd go about setting things up and then really quickly blend is the exact same as before as well zero means the full effect of spatial noise reduction will be applied 100 means none of the effect will be applied and if you want for example in this case to have 42 of the effect applied we'll want to set this to 58 to leave 42 percent of the effect to be taking place so with all of those settings covered i'm going to apply the power grades that i would typically put on this camera setup and i'm going to talk through its noise reduction settings and show the efficacy of those settings so i'll just apply my power grade and we'll come up to the noise reduction node and i'm actually going to come to the second node and disable it because that's some small bit of sharpening that i do to counteract the slight detail loss of my noise reduction so looking over we can see very quickly that i very much so use all those milliliter road settings for the temporal noise reduction and i have these uh i both set to a value of just eight so not very high values at all and i leave motion again in the middle of the road with blend all the way down to zero which means the whole effect is taking place and on the spatial side i'm not using that luma and i'll talk about that again in a moment i do have my bit of extra chroma noise reduction as for the mode and radius we're upon those least kind of processor intensive settings because i'm very much so in the lower range of the noise reduction we are applying and the spatial side of things so there's no need to really bunk those up super high so let's look at those areas that we had been looking at all along first coming down to the ipad you can see how much of the grainy noise has been reduced for us we've definitely taken the edge off there next up here was really bad for the chrome noise as well as luma and we've definitely taken a massive chunk off of that and we're at like 450 percent here so obviously we're pixel peeping next if i come up to the skin tones where things were really badly affected up in the forehead and this eyebrow area and we can see before and after with those fairly minimal settings just how much that is getting cleaned up now we're seeing how that's getting a bit softened which we then bring back with some sharpening to kind of find a happy medium to kind of recover some of that detail we can see just how much work and how much cleaning up that is doing to the noise in that particular section then we also had this area here and again we can see a huge improvement in both luma and the chroma noise look at this giant green block right here and it just totally disappears with those fairly minimal settings and then lastly this very problematic again for chrome noise especially on this far right corner we can see before and after look how large those blocks are and it's just alternating between green and magenta chroma noise and it's pretty much completely gone we still have a little bit of lumen noise there but again we're at almost a thousand percent uh zoomed in so once we go full screen if my graphics card doesn't have a heart attack you're probably not seeing a whole lot over the youtube compression but where i'm sitting and what i'm seeing it just takes our footage and gives it that nice clean look and takes off that harsh digital noise edge that we're getting from noise that is embedded in this particular shot and now my workflow top tip number three so i've mentioned about how i would avoid using the spatial noise reduction luma and the reason for this is because it very quickly starts to eat into your detail and soften your image so i'm going to show a side-by-side example so i'm going to do is turn everything down to zero leave everything else the same i'm going to zoom in to this area where we do obviously want to keep good detail because it's my face that's where people are going to be looking they're always going to look at the eyes so let's get good and zoomed in there if i apply a value of 10 to the temporal noise reduction luma you can see that it cleans up the noise fairly well on the lumicide and we do indeed get a bit of detail loss but it's nothing crazy and nothing that can't be brought back with a bit of sharpening on a node later on so before and after noise reduction natural amount of sharpness and a little bit of sharpness loss now i'm going to apply the same value to the spatial noise reduction of 10 on luma and i'm going to make sure that the node is toggled on now look how much detail has been lost and even if we bring back the same amount of sharpening afterwards with a node it still looks pretty terrible now of course we could alter the mode and the radius to improve the results but in a shot that isn't noisy because it's a too high in iso or it's madly underexposed the footage we're looking at is a log image on an 8 bit 420 camera there's always going to be an inherent natural amount of generic noise in that shot that we wouldn't exactly go calling it a bad noisy shot it just needs that extra little push and in shots like that where you're just maximizing the shot as opposed to fixing it if that makes sense i find that i'll always end up doing luma and chroma on the temporal and only chroma on spatial i will avoid luma on the spatial pretty much at all costs because of how quickly it will cause detail loss i hope you found this tutorial helpful did i miss something that should have been covered in this tutorial leave a comment below so i know to cover it in a future episode and of course don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss future uploads my name is lee dalton this is film resolved thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Film Resolved

Views: 13,257

Keywords: davinci resolve, color, color grade, color grading, filmmaking, filmmaker, cinematography, blackmagic, blackmagic design, tutorial, video, videography, tech, technology, sony, log, picture profile, education, information, slog3, sgamut3.cine, cinematographer, director of photography, dop, film, cinema, DaVinci Resolve 17, noise reduction, denoise, denoising, noise removal, temporal noise reduction, spatial noise reduction

Id: bRUlqrEZY2I

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021