- We've all seen plenty of videos
full of grainy footage, or visible noise.
It's incredibly common,
especially when filming in low light,
or using a lower-budget camera with a smaller sensor.
In the right conditions,
or actually it's probably the wrong conditions,
even your top-end cameras can have the same issues.
The most common way that people end up
with noisy or grainy footage
is by shooting in really low-light conditions,
and probably with gear that
isn't suited for those conditions.
So, in a lot of cases, if you're filming
in a location that's too dark,
and especially if you've got your camera set to auto,
it'll actually boost the gain, or the ISO levels,
up beyond where they should be,
in which creates a really grainy
or noisy look across your picture.
So unless that's the look you're going for,
you're gonna make your video look
really low quality, and in some cases,
the footage can be completely unusable.
Fortunately, there is an easy way
to help reduce most of this noise or grain,
and I'm going to take you through exactly how to do it.
Now, it's important to note that there are a number
of free options to reduce the video noise.
I've played around with a lot of them,
but none of them come close to achieving
a really professional result.
The best solution I've found is a
professional-grade plug-in that costs around $80 US.
It's used by a huge number of professional editors,
and works with all major professional editing software.
So, that includes your Premiere, Avid, Final Cut.
So, if you're using a more entry-level
software package like Screenflow,
you might want to look at upgrading just for this one.
The plug-in is called Neat Video,
and I use it all the time to polish up
any noisy footage from my clients.
I honestly can't count the number of times
that this neat video plug-in has rescued footage
that we thought was totally unusable.
It's incredibly simple to use,
and the results are fantastic.
So, let's run through a quick demo
with some grainy footage.
Okay, so I'm in Adobe Premiere,
and I've got some grainy footage here.
So you can see that it was shot in a dark situation,
so up here you've got a bit of noise and bit of grain there,
and then the swimming pool,
and also in this dark area here.
It's a little bit on the face,
but more so in the background.
So, the sign here in the background,
but it gets really noticeable in the darker areas.
I'll zoom in a bit just so you can have a look.
Let's get 200%.
And I'll grab the little hand.
And you can see the footage up here is pretty grainy.
And again in the bottom corner here.
So, we'll just get back to fit that in.
So what we're going to apply is an effect,
and it's called Neat...
Video Effects, Neat Video, Reduced Video Noise.
So, we just drag that on.
So, click on our clip here,
and we'll come up to Reduced Noise,
and you can see that there's some basic settings here.
By default, it's gonna do a pretty good job,
so what we'll do is just leave those,
and come in here to open up your
setup options for that effect.
The first place to start is
just to click Auto Profile.
It automatically picked a section,
and it's gonna analyze the noise level in that section.
Now we can pick it up and move it to a different area,
if there's a specific area that you want to fix.
And then it's just a matter of hitting apply.
And instantly, you can see how crisp and clear that is.
So we'll just zoom in here, let's get 200%.
You can see straight out there's still
so much detail in the face,
but the noise level in the background is just,
it's fixed up infinitely.
So, zoom back out now.
So that was just straight off the bat,
that's no...
No tweaking.
So if we come back to our settings,
and let's just draw out and area over here again.
If you come over here to Noise Filter Settings,
then you can actually pre-view the end result there,
straight out, without hitting apply.
And you can then get in and tweak and adjust
the settings to really create the look
or the level of adjustment that you're after.
So, as you can see, that's just insanely powerful.
Now, you will have to render it to play back.
I'll just jump in one more time to zoom in,
just to show you a quick before and after.
Let's just go up to this top corner here,
and so this is with the plug-in on,
and that's with the plug-in off,
as the footage was before.
So, a huge difference.
As you can see, it's incredibly easy
to polish up your noisy video footage.
The Neat Video plug-in is a really powerful
and professional tool, and I hope you find it
just as useful as I do.
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