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After Effects Grain Reduction for 16mm


Steve Zimmerman

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Our footage is 7213, overexposed 2/3rds at 160ASA. Most of our stuff is gorgeous, the processing and Scanity 2K scan are excellent.

 

I've been trying different settings using the After Effects CC Grain Remover filter. There are so many settings! I've gotten pretty good organic looking results with reduced grain using 3 passes of noise reduction and using the unsharp mask and chromatic suppresion, etc. I'm still getting a bit of isolated, noisy, unnatural looking grain, especially in dark browns. I could email anyone a still if you would like to see.

 

I read a lot about using the Temporal Filter to smooth the scan even more. How do you use this thing? When I check the box to turn it on, it looks smooth but washed out and low contrast.

 

As an experiment I tried using Temporal at 20% on a two duplicated layers, 41% for the first temporal filtered layer and 100% for the second layer without the extra smoothing. I see some good subtle effects, but I totally confused if I'm doing this right. I can find any tips to help figure this out online.

 

The Blu Ray for the original 1990's BBC House of Cards in really incredible with tight fine grain. How can we get something closer to that?

 

Could anyone please share some tips for quality grain reduction? Thanks in advance.

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To Clarify:

 

When I apply Temporal Filtering, it looks washed out and I cant color correct it back to normal. That's why I tried it as a layered effect. There must be a way to make use of this in a single layer?

 

Steve Z

 

Something funky w/ this website tonight, sometimes it looks like drudge report w/o pics and I cant edit my posts :-(

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Well, Since no one has responded I'll post what I found out to help others in the future.

 

I was getting noise because I was applying the After Effects Grain Reduction Effect after the Levels effect. I learned it needs to be at the top of the effects list. After correcting this the noise disappeared.

 

Use the single channel noise reduction, and view each of the red, green blue channels individually to see that you have removed most of the noise. Most of the noise is in the blue channel.

 

Now the temporal effect works fine too.

Edited by Steve Zimmerman
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Steve,

 

I use Dark Energy for AE, and find it superb for film, it's a tad on the pricey side, but well worth it IMO

 

http://darkenergyforaftereffects.com/

 

Cheers,

Sean

I definitely plan on trying it out soon. I'm on a Mac now but switching to a PC soon. I all learned the tips I typed above from a Dark Energy tutorial video, not from Adobe's website. :rolleyes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRpZT0-Ea-Q

Edited by Steve Zimmerman
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Steve,

2/3 overexposure for 13 stock is 125 ASA not 160. 160 ASA is more like 1/3 of a stop overexposure. Also, when you shoot, expose for shadows since you can bring highlight details back later on. This way, you can avoid excessive shadow grain build-up.

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Steve,

2/3 overexposure for 13 stock is 125 ASA not 160. 160 ASA is more like 1/3 of a stop overexposure. Also, when you shoot, expose for shadows since you can bring highlight details back later on. This way, you can avoid excessive shadow grain build-up.

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My mistake, looking at the slates I did expose at 125asa. I agree with overexposure too. I plan to expose for the shaded side of faces and overexpose one full stop whenever I can. I used that same method years ago for student projects with good results in standard def. I keep hearing about improved under exposure latitude for new films, but even now, film loves the light!

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  • 1 month later...

I haven't tried it yet...been busy with other things, but I learned that Dark Matter for After Effects is now 50% off. I emailed them and they say it is a permanent price reduction. :D

 

http://darkenergyforaftereffects.com/

 

http://darkenergyforaftereffects.com/demo-16mm-film/

Edited by Steve Zimmerman
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  • 2 months later...

Here's a follow up to my problem which I have seemingly completely solved. The key was to always render out the video as uncompressed 2k until the final 1920x1080 transcoding in Adobe Encore. This solved the problem of the image being overly grainy in dark areas. I was double compressing before, outputting as Blu Ray h.264 from AE or Premiere Pro, then it was transcoding in Encore. Uncompressed is a Huge Improvement. If not for faster computers and solid state drives, this would take very long renders without huge expensive RAID drives.

Edited by Steve Zimmerman
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That makes a lot of sense actually - H264 is very highly compressed, so it's going to cause all kinds of problems with further compression passes.

 

You might also experiment with ProRes (422HQ or 4444) instead of Uncompressed. It's a lightly compressed format, but gives you much more reasonable file sizes than Uncompressed. It's often a good trade-off when space is an issue - faster file copy times, faster render times, less disk space, and sometimes even faster encodes for Blu-ray, depending on your setup.

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