Noisy DVCAM Footage

[RABinMS]

A friend sent me several DVCAM tapes of music performance footage that he had shot, wanting them put on DVD. I rented a playback deck and transferred them to my PC via firewire using Scenalyzer. As it turns out, all of it contains a rather large amount of video noise (or much more than I expected anyway). I've tried cleaning it up a bit using MSU Denoiser (with and without Smart Smoother) and the demo version of the Neat plugin for Virtualdub.

While there has been some improvement, I'm not sure that it's the best result I can get overall. The blue lit portions seem a bit "foggy", while the better lit sections look pretty good. Since they're not really "scene changes", I have been trying to process them as one file to get a more consistent look throughout.

Here's a link to a few seconds of the raw footage that I've edited to try to show most of the different lighting conditions. Any suggestions on how I might best approach cleaning this up and the level of quality I can expect to get out of it are appreciated. I don't mind spending a few $$$ ($50-$100), but haven't licensed Neat yet. Would be happy to do that if I'm sure that it will do what I need it to do.

http://www.myotherdrive.com/dyn/file/137.521113.10012010.47244.6a64fi/Noise+Sample.avi

Thanks for any assistance.

[Soopafresh]

I like the grain. Ever see "The Song Remains the Same"?

You can clean it up, but it's very time consuming to significantly reduce the grain without softening the picture.

avisynth_degrained.avi

The above is using Avisynth with motion compensated denoising. If you're using your P4 machine to do this it'll take 1/2 hr to process the footage you posted.

Neat will work as well, but you'll have to play around with it for a while to get good results-(that's what she said). The advantage is the GUI and simplicity of use. It's still going to take a long time, unfortunately. Plus, make sure you've either taken care of the interlacing or tell NeatVideo you're working on an interlaced source.

[RABinMS]

Soopafresh, thanks much for taking the time to run that through avisnyth. I've seen it discussed around these parts for quite a while, but have never delved into it. You're right about Neat being simpler due to the GUI.

It looks like the avisynth filter is introducing some blockiness in the darker areas, so I think I'm still leaning towards Neat. Just haven't hit on the right settings yet to deliver the best balance of maintaining quality while reducing noise. I do have it set for interlaced vid, but thanks for pointing that out. Suppose I'll have to keep plugging away at it, slooowly as you point out. No doubt it will take a while on my P4 machine, but I'm perfectly OK with letting it run for a day or a week until it finishes.

And yeah, I remember Song Remains the Same well, and although I'd rank the band in the clip right up there with those guys in the movie this was shot in 1999. That's about 25 years or so after Song, and shot on digital video tape to boot, so I was HOPING for a better quality source to begin with. Oh well.

Thanks again for taking the time to check out the clip, process it and offer some suggestions. If anybody else has additional thoughts I'd be interested in hearing those as well.

[Soopafresh]

Yeah, definitely some blocks in the dark areas because of the 6MB file size upload limits on this site. Had to encode at a low bitrate as a result.

There's a very in depth PDF tutorial on NeatVideo

http://www.neatvideo.com/howtos.html

Good luck, and rock on.

[aedipuss]

appears to me the video is way way overboosted. there is no "grain" in it. i ran it through vdub and reduced the rgb levels about 33% and added a smoother to cover up some of the rest. levels -50 would be better but the lighting was too weak. here's a h264 version after correction.



noise+sample+levels-33+smoother-1.mp4

[jagabo]

Yes, the black level is too high. I'd pull it down and boost the gamma a bit. Neat Video will do a good job of noise reduction but it will be slow. And it's not free.

[RABinMS]

Thanks for all of the input. After working with it a bit yesterday I agree, the high levels are certainly the root of the problem. Have reduced the RGB and black levels, and bumped the gamma a bit. Getting MUCH closer to where I want to be.

Thanks again to all for some guidance. I may have additional questions on it, but for now I'll just take some time to work with what you've given me.