Steve Zimmerman Posted January 12, 2014 Share Posted January 12, 2014 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted January 12, 2014 Author Share Posted January 12, 2014 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 :-( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted January 15, 2014 Author Share Posted January 15, 2014 (edited) 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 January 15, 2014 by Steve Zimmerman 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Sean Morris Posted January 25, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted January 25, 2014 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted January 27, 2014 Author Share Posted January 27, 2014 (edited) 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 January 27, 2014 by Steve Zimmerman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giray Izcan Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giray Izcan Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted January 29, 2014 Author Share Posted January 29, 2014 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! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andres Pardo aka Gral Treegan Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 (edited) Give a try to Neat: http://www.neatvideo.com/download.html Its for digital video but I tested it with iflm and works good to. Bests! Edited February 2, 2014 by Andres Pardo aka Gral Treegan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted March 25, 2014 Author Share Posted March 25, 2014 (edited) 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 March 25, 2014 by Steve Zimmerman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Zimmerman Posted May 27, 2014 Author Share Posted May 27, 2014 (edited) 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 May 27, 2014 by Steve Zimmerman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perry Paolantonio Posted May 27, 2014 Share Posted May 27, 2014 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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