DV and grain/noise removal

[schmoppa]

With the intent to encode to mpeg2 or mpeg4, is it a good idea to try to remove some of the grain and noise in the original DV files that I transfered over from a D8/Hi8 player with DV over Firewire capabilities?

If so, how do I do that? Will Premiere 7 do that, or get a 3rd party program to do it?

Thanks!

[redwudz]

Filtering will remove noise, usually with some lose of resolution. Virtualdub, TMPGEnc both have noise filters. Virtualdub seems to have more filters/options. Noise filtering will generally improve the picture if it's noisy, but will add to the encoding time if used while encoding, sometimes by quite a bit. I filter DV in Virtualdub and frameserve the result to TMPGEnc to save some time and HD space. Old VHS tape really benefits from filtering, but it takes a long time to do a adaquate job. You need a fast computer and a lot of spare time to do it right. Filtering random noise will give you a slightly faster and better encode, though.