Today.
I want to show you
how to take your SLOG3 footage that looks like this when you color
grade it - really noisy, especially in the shadows.
To this dramatically less noise,
much cleaner and completely usable footage.
Hey, my name is Matt Johnson, and let's start by talking about
why this is happening.
And why your footage is looking noisy, especially whenever I'm sure you've seen
plenty of other people online using SLOG3 and not having this noise problem.
In short, if your footage is noisy,
you are not filming with your camera exposed brightly enough.
Unlike a normal picture profile where you would set your cameras
metering to 0.0, which means that isn't too under
are overexposed with SLOG3.
You actually want to overcome your footage by anywhere
between 1.7 to 2.0 stops over on your camera's metering.
This is going to look pretty bright.
And when you look closely you may even see some noise
in your footage, but this is actually the correct way to expose SLOG3.
And what's great is that whenever you go to color, grade this bright and flat image
and add all the contrast and saturation back to it so it looks normal.
You are also going to be bringing down your exposure levels
and crushing the blacks in the shadows, which is going to remove all that noise
and make your footage look super clean and noise free.
If you want more details about how to do this properly,
I have another video titled How to Easily Film in SLOG3
that will walk you through every single step that you need to take
to make sure you're getting great looking noise free footage when filming it.
SLOG3 I will link to the video in the corner and down in the video description.
Also, if you want to save time in your color grading and get great colors
with any picture profile, including SLOG3,
I've created a set of color presets called Who Is Matt Lutz?
That I will link to down below to save you time as well.
Now let's shift gears because we've talked about how you can fix your noisy
SLOG3 footage in camera, but now we need to talk about
how to fix your noisy SLOG3 footage that you've already filled.
We got to fix it and post-baby.
So if you are sitting there in front of your editing software,
with a bunch of SLOG3 footage that looks really noisy
because you didn't properly overexpose it, here's how to fix that.
Reduce your noise and make your footage usable.
I've got to fix this for you and we will start with the easiest and free option.
Fix number one is you need to modify the way you are color
grading your footage.
Also, I'm going to be doing these fixes in Adobe Premiere Pro,
but these techniques will work with any video editing software.
So please keep watching.
If you use final Cut or DaVinci, etc..
Starting off here in Premiere Pro, I have an example clip that I filmed
intentionally too dark.
This clip I exposed to 0.0 on the camera metering
instead of 1.7 to 2.0 stops over because it is flat.
It doesn't look bad,
but once I color great it you're going to see how much noise there is in the image.
Let's not do a quick color great on this clip.
I'm going to grab one of my SLOG3
LUTs here throw that on and dang that's dark.
Remember, my LUTs are made to work with footage
that is properly exposed SLOG3 and we underexposed this by nearly two.
Stop. So we're going to have to fix things here. A little bit.
Let's go over that exposure.
Start cranking that up there.
There we go. There we go. There we go.
There is good.
We have the shadows now because this room is not this dark.
Whenever I filmed it, and I don't want it to be a super moody shot.
So let's bring that up to there.
All right, quick little color. Great.
Applied head to then bring up the exposure and the shadows to make this look like.
I remember looking in the room placing this clip down here
and there is a lot of noise in the shadows.
Instead of what you would typically do in SLOG3
where you bring down the exposure to hide that noise.
I had to bring it up to properly expose things which
dramatically increased those noise levels so here's the first fix for you.
If you are dealing with this, where you had to bring up your exposure levels,
you are going to need to modify how you have colored this image
and you're going to need to tweak the exposure.
Specifically, you're going to want to bring up your highlights in mid tones.
More will bring your shadows down because there's usually significantly
less noise in the highlights and mid tones because these are the brighter
parts of the image, and noise typically likes to hide in the shadows.
So let's start tweaking this image and fixing it.
First, I'm going to bring the shadows back down to nothing by double clicking.
And let's go over to the curves.
Yes, our good old curves tool here and let's click here in the middle.
Here on the bottom, here the top at all these connecting points here.
So this point is going to affect my highlights.
This point is going to affect my midtones This point is going to affect my shadows.
We do not want to bring up the shadows because they're not looking so good.
So instead, let's go over here and focus on the mid tones.
Bring those up a bit
pick up the highlights a bit.
And if we bring this point over here and just bring up the midterms
more in the shadows, that we were still keeping these shadows darker.
But we're trying to make the mid tones of my face look brighter
and then go back over very basic correction here.
And I'm going to increase the whites here a bit, which see, that's only affecting
the highlights of the image more so than the shadows
bring the shadows down a little bit more.
I don't want glowing skin tones.
And there you have it by going to the curves and adjusting
the mid tones and highlights while leaving the shadows more alone
and then going back up here to the basic corrections section
and bring up the whites and highlights as well.
You're really going to be able to focus on the highlights
and mid tones of your image and try to expose those properly
while ignoring the shadows more as a warning to you,
this can result in an image that looks less than optimal,
but if you're wanting a cleaner image overall,
I would take this over a really noisy image where you're bringing up the shadow
levels too much.
Now that is the first fix.
But if that still isn't good enough for you and you really want to
dramatically improve the level of noise in your image,
that is where I'm going to recommend fixed number two.
And fixed number
two is going to require you to invest in a plug in called Neat Video.
This plug in cost
about 115 bucks for the pro version at the time of making this video.
But there are versions for pretty much every video editing software.
I absolutely love it and I find myself using this plug in a few times
per year whenever I have footage that I screwed up exposing.
So here's how neat video works.
First, I have created a new clip here that mimics
roughly where the first clip was exposed.
And as you can see, this clip has a ton of noise
in the shadows that we're definitely going to want to try to fix.
First thing I'm going to do is select the clip.
Then I'm going to go up to Effects, search for neat video.
And then here I'm going to select Reduce Noise, drag it down to the clip,
then go up to Effect Control's first click prepare.
Then you're going to want to click Build.
And Neat Video will then analyze all the frames of your clip and open then here.
It may look really intimidating because you've got your clip
and there's like a black and white and red and purple.
What does all this mean?
Good.
This is you really don't need to worry about any of it.
Just go up here and click Auto Profile
and Neville will then profile the noise in your clip.
And you'll notice here
that drew a little square and it says the noise level here is 3.7.
So automatically it should do a good job.
But if you notice, it's trying to profile noise
in an area of the image where there's not a lot of noise
maybe it's over here, but you want it to be over here.
You can go over here and you can just click
and drag and select that and you'll see it says Noise Level 5.00, dang.
That's a lot of noise.
So that way we're telling me video here is where a lot of the noise is here
in the shadows.
This is where I want it to be removed.
At this point, you can just get in here and hit apply if you want to,
but if you're noticing that neat video is not removing enough noise
and you want to get more advanced, let's go to Advanced Mode.
Shall we go up here, click on beginner mode and select Advanced Mode.
Ooh, fancy.
And then click adjust and preview here.
And the only things that I would consider changing here
are under temporal filter it'll say quality mode normal.
You can change this too high if you want.
Then you can select spatial and for quality mode,
you can also select high and that can help improve the noise reduction even more.
So that's something to do if you need to.
But in this case here,
I think is going to work fine without it, and so we don't need to worry about it.
So let's hit apply and give it a second here for video load.
Check it out. Massive noise reduction.
Now I do have one last warning for you before we playback this clip.
And I want you to be aware that Neat video is a very processor intensive plug in.
And while it has been significantly improved lately with the addition
of GPU acceleration, there is a chance that it still may
dramatically slow down your video editing and rendering.
So I would wait to apply the video plug in until you're done
editing the rest of your video.
Also, I would be very careful that you only apply it
to these specific clips that really need it in your video,
which should definitely help with your render time.
Let's render this clip out now, and here is a before
and after with how the clips look without any noise reduction.
Very noisy.
And here's that same clip with neat video applied and it is dramatically improved
and that's how you fix Noisy SLOG3 video footage.
Remember, I have those Who is Matt LUTs color presets
if you want to save time and help color grade your videos even faster.
I willing to them down below.
In addition, if you are a video editor, I would love to help you
improve your skills more.
I've put together a free guide called edit videos like a pro
and this guide will walk you through some of the most important
editing techniques that took me years to learn.
This guy is completely free and you can download it down in the video description
Thanks so much for watching and have a great day
As you can see, I brought
up the exposure levels to bring it back to about where it was before.