NEAT VIDEO 5 / How to Use the Best Footage Denoiser

it doesn't happen very often to stumble upon a product that has a huge impact on the way we work for several years i struggle with noise and footage especially videos made with drones and also with flickr in time lapses i had tried several fixes but never really find the solution then i tried neat video and instantly noise and flicker became a thing of the past it is probably the best 100 i ever spent for my video and photo workflow in this video i will show in the easiest possible way how using nik video you can get rid of luminosity noise chromatic noise and flicker in video time lapses and even photos at the end i will also show you how to fix local flicker due to the propellers of a drone if your interest is in drone video photo or of your time lapses don't forget to subscribe to my channel need video is available as a plugin for most video editors like premiere pro after effects final cut davinci resolve vegas and so on the price varies from one version to another and it is more or less in the range between 50 and 100 euros more or less the same in dollars the much improved version 5 has been released in 2019 and as a host of functions it is even possible to purchase third-party profiles for some specific situation but i will show you some extremely easy workflows for the most common situations that works for me practically on all occasions luminance noise is what is often referred to as grain small dots darker or brighter than the surrounding areas this footage was shot with a drone released a few years ago drones are much more prone to noise compared to regular camera and that is not surprising considering the small sensor and the basic build of the lenses the latest generation of dji drones has improved a lot but the previous one were noise machines as you can see this clip has tons of noise everywhere apparently mostly luminance noise notice also that the trees are a bit much lacking detail this was another issue with previous generations of drones i have to color grade this clip to be consistent with the color scheme of a specific project you can see that after color grading things are even worse a disaster in this example i'm using after effects but knit video works practically in the same way in all other programs i add a new adjustment layer and in effects i choose knit video in the top left corner we can read profile not ready so i hit prepare we now have this window with three smaller ones at the bottom analyzing the three main components of noise luminance noise chrominance noise on the magenta purple and chrominance on the blue cyan if i move around with a mouse we can control the amount of noise in the different parts of the image now i choose a portion of the image where i think there is a high amount of noise the area should be as uniform in color as possible and in most cases we have plenty of noise in the dark parts these trees should be fine for our purposes so i draw a box possibly quite big until the rectangle becomes green if you cannot identify an area big enough it will still work fine although with a bigger size we get a more precise reading we can see that the noise level in the area is around 10 which is a lot if we move to this other area of trees the noise is even worse in general when applying the noising in most programs there is a trade-off between reducing noise and losing detail we have to compromise and accept a softer image in exchange for the reduction of noise this is not the case with neat video as you generally get read at very high levels of noise without any loss of detail but in my experience it is better to avoid choosing an area with a noise value much higher than 10 in order to maintain detail so we choose the previous area i hit the button build profile on the top left on the right we have a window showing plenty of interesting values about the noise components and we plenty of function available as i mentioned before in its video there are gazillions of way to get rid of noise but my extremely simple method will work in almost any situations and now hit profile check to analyze the effect on the different areas if i drag the rectangle to a specific area i can see how the noise was before if i release the mouse button i can see how it is after the noising the luminance noise in the window on the bottom left is completely gone when i release the mouse there is maybe a risk of a tiny bit of softness in which case i will reduce the amount of luminance noise adjustment on the other two windows we can see that there is still a good amount of chromium noise both in the magenta and the cyan channels now i hit this button adjust and preview at the top we have a window filter settings on the right with three tabs temporal special and general in quality mode i increased radius to 3 for a more detailed analysis of noise if we open temporal noise we can check the level by clicking on the button begin the image turns blue with some white spot only in the sky we want to have all the non-moving areas solid blue which is the case here so we take no action and we can click on finish then we can check for logger flicker localized difference in luminosity in part of the frame you can see that we have plenty of spots all over the image but by moving the slider local flicker to the right to a value of 15 the spots have gone we can now hit finish jitter of detail is like some hot area dancing around the fine details due to compression in the file since we have plenty of trees in the scene we can increase the threshold a bit we have now finished with the temporal tub so we move to the spatial one here we deal mostly with chrominance noise in the profile check we saw that we had a good level of noise in both channels so i increased both sliders to 90. there are plenty other sliders for fine tuning but i find that this simple adjustment is in most cases all we need finally i tick the box for sharpening i'm always worried about sharpening tools as they tend to introduce artifacts but sharpening init video always work extremely well we can now click on apply and check the result as you can see the image before was a total disaster absolutely unusable afternoon video the noise has completely disappeared and it looks really nice now the detail in the houses is excellent in the tree is just decent certainly as good as it was before the noising if we want to try to get a bit of extra detail in the trees we could go back and lower the noise reduction settings but i'm happy with this clip if we analyze before and after the difference is hard to believe let's move to a totally different scene we are in the east coast of sicily in summer in the middle of a very hot and hazy day i avoid shooting under this kind of conditions as the light is simply horrible with no contrast whatsoever i could hardly see the difference between the sea and the sky i never shoot footage in summer in southern europe and even less in the middle of the day it is the time when videographers are supposed to sleep but i have to do this video so i had to try to get something acceptable out of it after a good dose of post-processing this is how the footage looks like disaster not only a huge amount of noise everywhere but you can also notice big blobs of chromatic noise in the sea and in the road before meeting neat video this clip would have gone directly to the bin so i open a layer on after effect i load knit video and hit prepare i choose a rectangle in the lower part of the c and the reading is around 11 which indicates a huge amount of noise i hit build profile and then profile check if i expect the image the luminance noise seems to have disappeared everywhere in the a image but it seems that a bit of chromatic noise is still there this time i want to check what happens if i simply accept the automatic profile created without any extra settings so i hit apply and this is the result the noise has totally disappeared around the road in the bush near the castle the detail is now excellent but if we look hard there is maybe still a hint of noise in the sea so we go back to neat video and see what we can do i click on the button adjust in the temporal tab i set the radius to 3 and i can see that there is a bit of temporal noise so i push the slider to 45 percent and it is gone i checked the local jitter there is hardly any i get rid of it at about 8. then i check adapt to changing noise i move to the special tab since the noise was mostly chrominance i increased the sliders for the magenta and for the cyan channel to 90 percent i checked the box for sharpening and i can hit apply if we analyze the clip i have the impression that the noise in the sea has totally disappeared as usual neat video has rescued a totally unusable clip flicker is a very frequent issue in time-lapse never lapses depending on the type of lenses used in a camera or a drone these days with my nikon d850 and the new generation of drones i hardly ever get any flicker at all this hyperlapse was taken in brighton with a drone from six seven years ago and you can see the huge flashes of light wow the movement of cars and people is so jittery i didn't even have any nd filter for that drone at the time so let's call knit video to the rescue as usual i build a profile and go to adjust and preview in the case of flickr we are only concerned with the temporal tab we set the radius to 3 and we check the temporal noise we can see that there is quite a lot so i push the slider to the right until it is mostly gone then i check the local filter and i set the slider to around 15. the magic slider for flickr is the next one frame flicker but for the moment we leave it alone just to check if the adjustment we made so far have done any good so i checked adapt to changing noise and hit apply as you can see most of the flicker is already gone but there are still a few minor flashes of light time to use our magic slider so we got back to neat video and this time we crank all the way up the frame flicker slider and as you can see the flicker is totally gone now in this time lapse of mount aetna having one of his frequent shows we have an issue that can happen at times with drones the shadow from the propellers is clearly evident on the left part of the image causing a sort of flicker the clip needs stabilizing badly but it is better to get rid of this flicker before i start with the same workflow as in the previous image i get rid of temporal noise of local flicker and then crank the frame filter all the way to the right i also check adapt to changing noise we can see that the shadows from the props is now mostly gone but we can still notice a bit of flicker on the left edge of the scene so we can try to apply another instance of the noising we go exactly through the same routine and at the end the propellers have disappeared excellent software i really recommend it the only denoiser that can close is the one supplied with davinci resolve studio the premium version if you're interested in drones videography photography don't forget to subscribe to my channel bye for now

Channel: VIC VideopIC

Views: 25,146

Keywords: after effects, after effects clean up footage, clean up noisy footage, Davinci resolve, deflicker, denoise in Premiere Pro, denoiser, drone flicker, flicker, frame flicker, how to reduce noise, how to remome vidoe grain, Neat video, neat video 5.0, neat video denoiser, neat video plugin, neat video tutorial, neat video workflow, neatvideo, noise reduction, premiere pro, reduce flicker, reduce noise, remove video noise from footage, time lapse flicker, video noise

Id: C4LPhBV53yw

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021