Noise Removal Software recommendations

[Matt W.]

That's true for all grain reduction/noise reduction. Bear in mind you can apply NR to highlights only, blacks only, mids only, even do all three at different settings, or apply NR to just a specific part of the shot or a specific color. BMD is claiming better performance from Resolve 14, but be warned it's only in Beta right now.

Very true, and Resolve is a good option from what I've seen. It also might be a lot faster depending on your hardware. But in the past I've still seen the best results from Neat Video, by a significant margin. In vfx and with short form content it seems to be particularly popular because it is excellent... but slow.... I think it depends on what you need and what kind of content you're working with and at what res you're delivering. Neat video on 4k DPX is really slow.

Do You guys renoise/regrain Your footaga after denoise/degrain process or leave it clean?

I usually mix the final denoised product with the original to reduce but not eliminate noise entirely and focus on areas that need help (blue channel, shadows, usually). I've seen studio features where they push the noise reduction way too far so that the night exteriors are the cleanest shots in the movie and have a plastic texture. I'm sure I've seen other features where it's so seamless I didn't know they had a degrain pass. Fincher's stuff looks great I think that's Lowry process, which seems to remove noise entirely. For blu ray authoring there's a technician introducing noise and dithering to optimize the 8 bit output plus whatever they started with as source having however much noise/grain it has as a starting point.

For vfx I degrain aggressively at highest quality and then regrain to match. Every vfx house has different grain management workflows it seems... ranging from embarrassing to anal retentive in quality. But for grain management and finishing with various different cameras etc. I think Dark Energy etc. provides the best tools and I understand that their software is on par with Neat Video but more flexible.... not my department, though.

I'm waiting for Neat Video to implement regraining from saved profiles. For vfx work this is indispensable and for mixing different camera systems it is, too. Smoke has good grain management from what I understand but that's above my pay grade lol.

 

[Peter Moretti]

FWIW, I have found that temporal noise reduction gives significantly better results in the majority cases than does spatial noise reduction.

 

[Marc Wielage]

FWIW, I have found that temporal noise reduction gives significantly better results in the major cases than does spatial noise reduction.

Go to "Better" rather than "Faster" and you will see a difference in quality. Resolve 14 also has some subtle improvements in NR. I generally tend to use a combination of SNR and TNR, but in some cases I'll use it selectively only on the parts of the frame that really need it, either through a key (like noisy blacks) or windows.