Fix Noisy/Grainy Video in DaVinci Resolve | Neat Video Plugin

if you're a filmmaker videographer or VFX artist like me one of the things that you're going to run into very very frequently is noisy grainy footage and so today I want to show you the plugin that I use almost every single day my job in visual effects that I've used on Marvel films DC films that is a staple to being able to do high quality work you can use free Alternatives in DaVinci Resolve like I'm I'm using DaVinci Resolve here but I'm using DaVinci Studio but even in the free version you can do things in the fusion tab to help reduce noise and Grain and clean up your video there's other tools like topaz Labs video AI which I essentially trying to record this to compare to that tool but it was really not giving me good results in terms of what I wanted to do with this I think that tool really shines where you're using old footage that you're upscaling to 4K and it really cleans it up and gives you nice high quality footage but what I'm talking about is working on high-end films or even just you know any kind of video project will you need a lot more fine tuning and control over your image that you can go through and select areas and really get the best out of it so this footage is from a short film I shot last year called The Collector you can watch it on this YouTube channel here now while the tool we're talking about today is a paid tool I'm going to link in the description below another Critters video that goes through how to do noise reduction completely for free in the free version of DaVinci resolves you do not have to spend a penny using the fusion Tab and using the tools in the so please go check that out if you don't want to spend any money on this but I do think it's worth looking at what you can achieve with professional tools spending a little bit of money so the tool in question that I'm talking about today is made by a company called neat video the plugin itself is called reduce noise and this is the industry standard you can use things like the red giant denoise sir and use that in After Effects and it can do a pretty decent job but if you go to any high-end visual effects Studio they are using this tool and it does such an incredible job at cleaning up noisy flickery footage these clips that you're seeing here are not hyperbole this generally can do this level of cleanup for you and I've done it myself many times like they're showing it here used on a wedding video but even if you're just doing like very simple visual effects like removing a wire is very typical that you do you want to use a tool like this to remove any noise any grain do your paint work and then reintroduce that noise after so it looks like it was captured in camera without that wire ever existing for example now as I said it's a paid tool it's not crazy expensive if you compare it again to something like topaz Labs video AI that tool is 300 US dollars but it does offer other features that this doesn't this is just a denoising plug-in I got the version for resolve even though I don't do visual effects in resolve I do my visual effects in the foundry's nuke which is like a node based compositing package but it is a subscription based compositing package I wanted a tool that works in DaVinci Resolve where I'm not paying any additional subscriptions or any additional fees and regardless of what compositing package I'm using I can always use this tool because I use it for my color grading if the colors are very if it's very noisy footage and the colors are kind of flickering when I'm adding my grade I'll denoise it using this tool and then I'm good to go or as I said with the VFX example I can render out my denoise plates in resolve take it into my compositing package of choice work on it and then bring the final composite back to resolve and put into my edit so this price it's a hundred dollars that's U.S prices this is a limited version where it only goes up to 1080p so HD and you're not supposed to use it for commercial projects so I do client work so this doesn't really work for me and I shoot a lot of my videos in 4k or 6K on the red Komodo so the resolution limit is not going to cut it for me so I ended up buying it at the pro version which is 180 US dollars but as I said I use this almost every single day so in my opinion it is worth it but for you that might not be justifiable if you're just cleaning up some footage here are the very infrequently you may want to find other cheaper alternatives as I said in that video that I linked below so the clips I'm using are from a short film that I shot last year and this on the left is essentially the footage straight on the red camera I've applied a lot to it using film convert nitrate to make it look Rec 709 so it's a little bit more representative of the final image but you can see it's not very noisy footage this is typical of what you would see on a movie or a TV show everything will still have some noise and some grain but it's not glaringly obvious this is very clean footage this is 6k rendered out at 4K so it's down sampled very very clean so to really exaggerate this because in the short film I was doing a VFX shot that comes right after this but I don't want to spoil the film but it's the same angle same everything same actor and so what I did was I exposed the shot up two stops so that you can really see more of that grain it might not read through on this full frame shot but I'll take you into the color Tab and we'll zoom in and hopefully you can really see how much grain and noise there is there again boosted two stops this is still very very clean by any other metric but for this example we're going to say that this is how we got the footage and it's very noisy so I'm going to start off I'm just going to zoom in here so when we come back we can really see the difference but I have the tool here as I said the company is called neat video but the tool is called reduce noise I'm going to add a new node and drag this on and this tool here will work the same way in every single program that you open it it will have this repair noise and adjust the filter settings so we're going to hit prepare noise profile hit Progressive you can have that not show up but if you ever work with interlace footage you might want that pop-up to come up so it knows what it's dealing with and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hit Auto profile so what that's doing is it's analyzing the footage here and finding an area that is a good representation of the noise that it's seeing in the footage I'm in the advanced mode right now and this has given me all these extra options if you do use reduce noise or video I recommend you switch it to advanced mode it really is worth learning how these tools work rather than just relying on a on a one-click solution because you will get so much more quality out of this so this is what it's determined is a good starting point now you'll notice if I zoom in the noise is still here and that's because you need to go to this tab here adjust and preview and and now we can see the result of its selection so as I click and drag it shows me the original image and then I Let Go it shows me the final result and it's not too bad it's still a little soft I would say a little bit too much detail is being lost especially around the eyes if you look here there's a couple of little lines here that I kind of got lost it's ever so slightly soft here so we're losing some of that eyelash detail so we want to try and bring that back and again on the eyebrow as well so I'm going to go back to the prepare noise profile tab so we're seeing the original and what I'm going to do is look around and start trying to select areas that are flat and even in terms of lighting and texture you don't want to select areas that have a lot of texture because it's going to read that as noise and try and remove it so if I for example went to Danica's forehead here you can see there's a lot of noise from the sensor but there's also skin detail right there's all these fine lines that you can see here and there's also like peach fuzz and like her detail that it's going to interpret as noise and then it's going to remove it and make the image look blurry and what all we're trying to do is remove the noise and keep the detail so I'm finding areas like this where it's very flat and consistent again also not using clothes which have a lot of detail and texture because it's going to interpret those as noise so we want to find areas that are very flat and consistent like if I do this for example it will give me a warning saying not not uniform y y being the luminance Channel because you've got dark and you've got light and it's using the luminance channel to determine where it's sampling from so I'll select this area here and then over on the again on the advanced mode over here you can actually start refining your selection so this is from the auto profile I've not changed anything and I have selected this area and you can see here these little dots have lit up and that's the area of the image in terms of this scale from dark to light were those color channels set the red the green and the blue and if I click manual find tune you'll see that it will actually change this curve on all of the kernel channels sometimes it won't if you've already sampled an area that's very similar it's not going to change those but it will adjust and refine itself based on these little selections so you know if you don't use the auto profile if you want it to start over you want to try and find an area that is very even and consistent that is a good representation of the noise especially trying to get a green box like this if a red box like this it's just it there's not enough information for it to get any info from a yellow box means it's okay it's like a good ish amount like it's a small sample you don't really want to build your profile from that but when you're doing this like little refinement process that's totally fine because it's already got its base profile set up with this green square you want to build from that so if you wanted to do it and you wanted to do an auto profile you absolutely can so I'm gonna hit that again it's chosen the same spot or I can select mine area like this and build my profile from that which is a much larger area than it auto detected and will give you a slightly different result but it might give you a better result so I'm going to go through and select little small areas so again that's not enough so we'll find somewhere over here hit this manual refine didn't really change anything here where there's like it's a little flatter a little bit more even yeah so there it kind of tweaked these areas here and you're just trying to as I said build this little profile and get the best results that you can I'm not going to spend much more time on this but you can see we've brought a little bit more of that detail back than we had before and we're just removing the noise without really losing any of the texture and that's the key that's the goal that we're working towards now neat video reduce noise is a heavy tool if you are going to use it I highly recommend that once you've done your denoise you render that result out and then re-import it back in whether you're doing visual effects on it whether you're just editing and you're going to do color grading whatever it might be because if you're applying this on every single clip it's gonna really bog down your computer use up a lot of memory and slow the whole process down and even when you're rendering and exporting it's processing this as a live tool and it's very heavy and your renders will take a long time so I'm going to hit apply and now if we look in here if I just turn this off so we got a little bit more space we can compare the before and after pretty easily so this is before after and you can see it is heavy like look how long it takes to enable like that but it's done a great job and that way I can now take this shot over to my compositing package start doing the work do the paint do the cleanup whatever let's say I want to remove this thing here I can take that out and then I can reapply my grain bring it back into my edit and finish it and it gives me a great result this isn't an extreme example of what this tool can really do I wanted to show something that is a little bit more everyday so as I said you might want to use this for color grading so if we go in and want to select like the skin tone let's say and then we go here not the best but you can see that it's very very noisy on that selection I've D I've uh disabled the reduced noise here so what king essentially the raw file which is very noisy and you can see it's kind of jittering the whole way through if we then enable the the denoise plug-in give it a second it's a lot smoother in terms of what it's selecting is it perfect no but here you can see it's a lot heavier to scroll through but the selection is a lot more consistent frame to frame so again you want to make sure that you are exporting your denoise and then bringing it back in before you're doing things like this because it can be very slow and very taxing on the resource of your computer I'm using a Mac Mini M2 like it's nothing to write home about but it is still you know a very capable machine but this will add a lot of heft to your color grading process or your VFX process so keep that in mind but yeah as I said this is a little bit more of an indicative way in which you might use it Beyond just the extreme examples of fixing broken footage or noisy underexposed footage but actually to enhance the quality of your work even if you shoot things really well or working with really high quality footage as I said every film that I've worked on big films indie films TV shows everything that I've ever worked on I've used this tool on regardless of what it was because I'm adding visual effects to things I'm doing paint work I'm adding CG work I'm doing green screen even to improve the quality of your green screen King denoise it first work on denoised footage and then do all your visual effects and then add the grain back on or the noise back on after you will end up with much better results anyway I hope that you enjoyed this overview of this tool I didn't really go into the nitty-gritty details of how every single setting works or any things I think that it's something that you need to really discover on your own but try it out there is a demo version I highly recommend it I use as I said use it every day on high-end movies down to any TV show music videos my own short films it helps with color grading it helps with visual effects and if you have really really broken footage that is super underexposed or noisy or grainy or whatever it might be it could really really help I recommend spending the time to learn all of the ins and outs but I just wanted to show how I use this tool and why I think it's a great tool that is worth the money and as I said at the beginning I bought it for my editing software because I will always have access to DaVinci Resolve rather than a paid subscription option even with Adobe or wherever it might be I will always have access to this tool it is not a lost plugin once I stop paying for those other software applications so you will have it for a very very long time and on it will work on any machine that you have I hope that you found this useful and interesting and maybe you'll give it a try I'll link to the plugin itself in the description and as I said I'll link to the free alternative video using the free version of DaVinci Resolve but that's it for now thank you so much and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Cameron Kidd

Views: 1,421

Keywords: denoise, fix bad video, fix noisy footage, fix grainy video, fix flickering video, color grading, visual effects, greenscreen, better green screen, noisy, plugin, plugins, tools, after effects, davinci, resolve, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve studio, marvel vfx, dc vfx, danika frederick, editing, free, overview, guide, first look, tutorial, first impression, free software

Id: wtgM8BsaaMI

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2023