Red Epic Noise Reduction test at ISO 12800

[Christoffer Glans]

There's been a lot of talk about the new OLPF for Dragon and how noisy it is. I went out to test some noise reduction by shooting in the worst possible way I could with my Epic MX. By worst I would say that 2K 200 fps at ISO 12800 is pretty much one of the worst ways to shoot something. Especially when every light around you has a variety of frequencies and color.

Now, while I do think that at 2K you start to see some artifacts, the result is not totally bad. As for 5K or 6K material, it's not even noticeable.
So if you tend to underexpose your footage or shoot a lot of night scenes without proper lightning then just do some noise reduction on that footage.

Here's the video
Red Epic Noise Reduction Test - Stockholm 2014

Post production was done in Premiere (editing) and noise reduction in After Effects and then exporting to DPX 4K and grade in DaVinci Resolve with film convert plugin (without grain). Finished editing in Avid to 1080p masters (lower resolution due to some 2K material). Upscaled to 4K to get more detail online.

Shot on Red Epic MX
5K, 3K and 2K at ISO 6400 - 12800
Red mini mags (5:1 at 5K and 8:1 at 2K)

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Very nice work, Christoffer!

 

[Mark Phelan]

Well done and good test. Thank you.

 

[D Fuller]

Post production was done in Premiere (editing) and noise reduction in After Effects and then exporting to DPX 4K and grade in DaVinci Resolve with film convert plugin (without grain). Finished editing in Avid to 1080p masters (lower resolution due to some 2K material). Upscaled to 4K to get more detail online.

Really interesting test, Christoffer. A couple of questions:

- Was the NR in After Effects done using the stock plugins that come with AE or a third party plugin like Neat video?

- I've not used the Film Convert plugins. Are they contributing to NR as well or are they just providing a grade?

- Would you explain about upscaling to 4K tot get more detail online? How does that work?

Many thanks,

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Really interesting test, Christoffer. A couple of questions:

- Was the NR in After Effects done using the stock plugins that come with AE or a third party plugin like Neat video?

- I've not used the Film Convert plugins. Are they contributing to NR as well or are they just providing a grade?

- Would you explain about upscaling to 4K tot get more detail online? How does that work?

Many thanks,

I didn't have any good plugins for noise reduction so I got my hands on an AE with Neat Video, which I then rendered out as 4K DPX files and put through resolve.
I wouldn't get the AE plugin though, it's a hassle to go through an extra step just for noise reduction. Better to get the OFX for Resolve directly, faster and better.
The Film Convert was applied to get nicer skin tones and colors fast. It's a remarkable plugin that really does wonders to colors in the first pass. But for this I didn't add any film grain with it, I just applied the film curves based on the Kodak vision3 stock.

The upscale was just done from the 1080p master file to a H.264 4K file so that when uploaded to youtube, the bit rate becomes higher and more details of the noise is visible. Regular 1080p on youtube is crap, so using 2160 even for 1080p material is better.

Thanks!

 

[D Fuller]

I didn't have any good plugins for noise reduction so I got my hands on an AE with Neat Video, which I then rendered out as 4K DPX files and put through resolve.
I wouldn't get the AE plugin though, it's a hassle to go through an extra step just for noise reduction. Better to get the OFX for Resolve directly, faster and better.
The Film Convert was applied to get nicer skin tones and colors fast. It's a remarkable plugin that really does wonders to colors in the first pass. But for this I didn't add any film grain with it, I just applied the film curves based on the Kodak vision3 stock.

The upscale was just done from the 1080p master file to a H.264 4K file so that when uploaded to youtube, the bit rate becomes higher and more details of the noise is visible. Regular 1080p on youtube is crap, so using 2160 even for 1080p material is better.

Thanks!

Thanks Christoffer.

I agree about the OFX plugin for Resolve, but I own the plugin for AE, so it works for now.

The upscale rout for YouTube is interesting. I'll have to do some tests. Grain is especially hard to keep intact on a 1080 h.264 file, even at 12Mbits, so the upscale idea is worth a look.

 

[Will Keir]

Love seeing NR tests, thanks for this post.

Matt Ryan did a test for me of a underexposed bedroom scene light with 1 blue fill. I wish he would post it, pretty amazing what can be saved with the right person. I'll CC him, maybe he'll get around to it now.

There's been a lot of talk about the new OLPF for Dragon and how noisy it is. I went out to test some noise reduction by shooting in the worst possible way I could with my Epic MX. By worst I would say that 2K 200 fps at ISO 12800 is pretty much one of the worst ways to shoot something. Especially when every light around you has a variety of frequencies and color.

Now, while I do think that at 2K you start to see some artifacts, the result is not totally bad. As for 5K or 6K material, it's not even noticeable.
So if you tend to underexpose your footage or shoot a lot of night scenes without proper lightning then just do some noise reduction on that footage.

Here's the video
Red Epic Noise Reduction Test - Stockholm 2014

Post production was done in Premiere (editing) and noise reduction in After Effects and then exporting to DPX 4K and grade in DaVinci Resolve with film convert plugin (without grain). Finished editing in Avid to 1080p masters (lower resolution due to some 2K material). Upscaled to 4K to get more detail online.

Shot on Red Epic MX
5K, 3K and 2K at ISO 6400 - 12800
Red mini mags (5:1 at 5K and 8:1 at 2K)

 

[Will Keir]

12800 ISO!!! That's crazy, the before and after is really well done. Especially the shot with the little blond girl, HUGE difference. Pretty much unusable before the NR.

Thanks for sharing Christoffer.

How long did the NR processing take? Have you tried the A.D.D. feature in RedCine X?

 

[Douglas Underdahl]

Really impressive, Christoffer, and shows what a great combo Red and Neat Video are for low light situations.

 

[David Battistella]

Christoffer,

thanks for the tests. I would have loved to see one or two wipes comparing to 800iso as well, just to give people an idea just how much you can push an r3d file. I like these kinds of stress tests, ultimately it extends the usefulness of the camera.

This is exactly why I think it's good to noise reduce after the camera rather than in camera, there is so much more control this way.

Great test.

battistella

 

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

In some extreme cases you'd Neat Video the hell out of that footage and re-grain it with plugin or scanned film grain layer, maybe with a tad bit of that "Clarity" effect. In certain cases it helps, in others not so much.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

How long did the NR processing take? Have you tried the A.D.D. feature in RedCine X?

A.D.D don't work on MX footage so I didn't use that. The NR process is A LOT faster if you do it with GPU and the AE I worked with was a bit unstable with GPU so I could only do it with the CPU. It took around 4-5 hours to process the entire video (every shot has 5 passes of NR so it's quite heavy on the processor). If you do it in resolve with GPU acceleration I would imagine around a quarter of that time.

Christoffer,

I would have loved to see one or two wipes comparing to 800iso as well, just to give people an idea just how much you can push an r3d file. I like these kinds of stress tests, ultimately it extends the usefulness of the camera.

This is exactly why I think it's good to noise reduce after the camera rather than in camera, there is so much more control this way.

Great test.

battistella

Thank you
As for Noise reducing 800 ISO I don't think that is needed. At 2K resolutions I imagine it would make a difference and of course if you want super clean material. But it wouldn't show on a youtube video, you would need the master file for that. Not even the high rates of Netflix would really show it cause compression destroys that kind of small noise. But then again, if you do NR on 800 ISO before showing it online it might boost the overall quality because the noise isn't boggling down the compression and bit rates with unnecessary information in the image. I might do a test on that, checking to see if totally clean footage gets better compared to noisy and/or added 35mm LUT grain.
The end game of your project must always demand how you shoot and process your material, most online videos put stuff in that look great on the 100 gb master file, but not so much on the 35mb H.264.

In some extreme cases you'd Neat Video the hell out of that footage and re-grain it with plugin or scanned film grain layer, maybe with a tad bit of that "Clarity" effect. In certain cases it helps, in others not so much.

In this video I didn't add any grain with Film Convert, only the color curve LUT for Vision 3. As in my answer above, I think that if you add grain you will loose overall quality when posting it through online compression. It's better to focus on getting a clean image with great colors and try to keep it free of anything that clogs the compression.

As an example, look at House of Cards on netflix compared to some other film shot with 35mm. It's not just the sharpness, everything has more depth in the House of Cards footage because the compression is focused on the colors and luminance rather then keeping track of the grain.

 

[Matt Ryan]

This is the test I did for Will if anyone is interested. The image was almost non existent at 800ISO and the color temp is so far off. I boosted the image to 4000ISO and added a curve to push things further, balanced out the color temp, and added Neat Video. I love Neat Video and say it is one of the best investments you can make. It works even better on Dragon footage due to the smaller pixels.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6edes84bk6914em/WillKeirLowLight.zip (This has the 800ISO .mov, 4000ISO, 4000ISO w/ Neat Video, and final balanced looks with Neat Video.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Such a great stress test. Thanks Chirstopher!!

 

[Ryan W White]

Thanks for the test! I Just purchased resolve and am looking forward to stress testing NR in the node based workflow.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Neat Video has impressive bang for the buck and is compatible with a number of common tools. That said, I have to agree with Jake Blackstone that there are better options in the OFX universe that manage to kill 90% of the "noise" Neat does with less blurring. NR performance is a matrix of source material characteristics, target codec characteristics, processing precision, talent of the operator, personal taste, etc. so YMMV.

Cheers - #19

 

[Matt Ryan]

Neat Video has impressive bang for the buck and is compatible with a number of common tools. That said, I have to agree with Jake Blackstone that there are better options in the OFX universe that manage to kill 90% of the "noise" Neat does with less blurring. NR performance is a matrix of source material characteristics, target codec characteristics, processing precision, talent of the operator, personal taste, etc. so YMMV.

Cheers - #19

What plugin is affordable and does this? Everything in the range you speak of is in the thousands of dollars to license or is limited to nucoda...

 

[ericyoung]

Great test - thanks for sharing!

 

[jake blackstone]

What plugin is affordable and does this? Everything in the range you speak of is in the thousands of dollars to license or is limited to nucoda...

No expensive plug in is necessary. Just don't shoot ASA 12800. Or if you must, choose another camera, that is capable of shooting clean 4k images at those and higher ASA
As I said in the past, I find it ironic, that on the forum where people are so obsessed with 6K, pixel peeping and preserving every bit of power in RAW processing, would have no compunction degrading the image in post just to prove the point, that MX can shoot in low light and $99 plug in can help making it appear better...

 

[Nick Fury]

What plugin is affordable and does this? Everything in the range you speak of is in the thousands of dollars to license or is limited to nucoda...

And...it is going to be more affordable, for a short while. If you are not in a rush, wait until tomorrow, for particulars, on Neat Video... Stay tuned...