Prores Noise Reduction - In Camera

[Isaac Newcombe]

Hi all,

When looking at fast turn around processes, I am wanting to shoot prores for the production house and making it as simple as dropping a LUT on days where they are not booking a onliner.

When we have a colourist, we may place a quick noise reduction across the footage. But on fast turn around projects it’s LUT and forget.

I am just curious, does Prores on the Komodo or DSMC2 have noise reduction? (I know R3D does not).

 

[Marc Wielage]

I think this is dangerous, because noise level constantly changes, and you have to be able to see the picture and make reasonable judgements on how much NR is too much, and how much is too little. There is no "one size fits all" when it comes to noise reduction.

I don't have a problem if it's quick-and-dirty dailies or something, but we generally hate when somebody has stomped on the files with NR before we get them for final color, and we can't get the original Raw files.

 

[Alex Lubensky]

Hi all,

When looking at fast turn around processes, I am wanting to shoot prores for the production house and making it as simple as dropping a LUT on days where they are not booking a onliner.

When we have a colourist, we may place a quick noise reduction across the footage. But on fast turn around projects it’s LUT and forget.

I am just curious, does Prores on the Komodo or DSMC2 have noise reduction? (I know R3D does not).

AFAIK there's no noise reduction in prores also. BUT, prores renders footage in macroblocks, and depending on the prores flavour - the size might change. Such rendering results in somewhat cleaner, but less detailed image - like on the OG Alexa RAW has way more detail compared to PRORES, but with the detail - noise becomes more accentuated. So when shooting in prores you're already getting a bit "cleaner" image.

 

[Phil Holland]

Without technically being noise reduction, keep in mind that oversampling and then scaling to your output resolution can have the subtle benefit of lowering noise.

Expanding a bit. If you are capturing at 8K or 6K and scaling down to 4K or 2K in camera or in post that will yield less visible noise than shooting at that native resolution in camera. Also, that scaling down will increase captured detail when coming from an oversampled source. And for advanced users you can tinker with various scaling algorithms and methods to fine tune you're output further.

Fun tangent and not totally related this ProRes workflow, but sort of relevant. Prior to RED and pretty much most of the digital cinema world this was one of the beneficial gains when we scanned motion picture film at a higher resolutions and scaled down to our working or delivery resolution. Scanning at native 1:1 resolution yielded sort of the worst results and often didn't take into account the resolution of the source material. 2K for instance, not enough resolution for a proper Super 35mm scan. If you're curious about a 1.5X oversample was and still is ideal when it comes to digitizing film. Lots of other little variables in there, but that's pretty much what we found and how the industry moved forward. Did a bit of 2X, but a wee bit overkill when it comes to film reproduction.

For those who understand that mindset and film workflow, it's one of those "oh hey would you look at that" moments when you consider RED correctly focused on 6K and 8K acquisition. And you can certainly finish out at native resolutions as well. Digital from the get go at the pixel sizes we're talking about generally is higher resolution and certainly cleaner than celluloid for a given image plane surface area/format size. Certainly one of the key reasons some filmmakers today have really focused on working with larger formats for that matter.

 

[Isaac Newcombe]

I guess I should have thought about where NR is added to a camera first. I had assumed it was at the codec level, but I guess more obviously it’s camera based. Which makes sense that Prores would not have NR if the R3D did not. I guess my original thought was that NR was post processing and therefore raw would not include this by nature of it being raw, but prores might.

Marc - You are right, I would not slap NR on absolutely everything, only where needed. Genuinely the image is clean, but when needed we may need a clean up.

Alex - I am guessing this is by factor of compression? That would make sense with the higher the compression, the less finer details like noise would stay

Phil - That is a great point about down sampling that I had completely forgotten about! Thank you for that!! Also extremely interesting about film scanning and workflow, that gives a broader insight into grain and format!

 

[Alex Lubensky]

Alex - I am guessing this is by factor of compression? That would make sense with the higher the compression, the less finer details like noise would stay

Yup, exactly. One can easily see this when zooming in on a prores file in resolve and using selective color. It will select it in blocks of various size depending on which exactly prores codec was used. It's a bit more complicated than just blocks of course, but to simplify this - using prores in camera is already like using slight noise reduction, with a cost of slightly loosing some detail. In fact, it is always cleaner noise-wise on every camera that records prores and raw that I've used.

Also yes, what Phil mentioned - downscaling also will reduce noise

I suppose there's no room for NR in prores on Komodo to be done on camera level - there's simply not enough horse power for that. But on Raptor - who knows, maybe if lots of people will ask for that. At least Alexa35 now has some temporal NR in camera at some specific ISO settings