Pre / Post Clip Noise Reduction

[Jaemie Manners]

What is everyones consensus. Pre or Post clip noise reduction.

They both have valid reasons, but what does every one prefer? And why? Apart from clean source footage 😉

Edited July 11, 2019 by Jaemie Manners

[Anton Meleshkevich]

I prefer NR in a clip node.

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

Same as Anton, I do NR as either my first node or the first node after a CST-node. All at Clip-node-level. That way you can node-cache the NR-node (User Cache), and everything downstream from that will be real time. (Depending on your hardware of course.).

I have the NR-node in my pre-built nodetree.

However, I only use the NR-node when it’s really needed. Not a fan of overusing NR. 

Cheers

 

 

[Jaemie Manners]

Yeah I've been doing some NR on a series. Some of the noisiest arri I've ever seen. I hate overusing it too, but sometimes it calls for it.

Good to hear of others techniques

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

Another thing I also do is blend is in some of the original source, so the clip keeps a subtle amount of the original noise (depending on how bad the noise is of course). Alternatively you can add grain to the denoised footage with a common grain so that the texture blends nicely. Plastic feeling footage is never nice B.)

[Marc Wielage]

This is often a bone of contention in the film restoration business. My take is you need to do NR last, because the contrast that happens in correction could exaggerate noise problems more in some cases than others. If you apply the NR as the initial node and then correct after that, it's better for caching but you will see unequal noise levels caused by different settings cut-to-cut and scene-to-scene. I think it's a decision that has to be made differently per project.

I'm generally a fan of not noise-reducing unless we really need it, so I'll do it scene-wide for X number of shots, but then turn it off once the exposure goes back to normal. Added grain is kind of a separate issue.