De-noise RED Footage

[Alex Winker]

RED footage can be pretty noisy, even in ideal lighting conditions - and I've recently been turned on to the idea that people do a base level of denoising on all RED footage, even if it isn't blatantly problematic. How many of you guys do this?

If you do this, what tool do you use, and at what levels do you do it? Do you apply it evenly to the chroma and luma, or mostly just the chroma? I'm working on coloring something heavily shot with RED that will go to theater and web. Do you guys approach this differently depending on the output?

[Misha Denisov]

I got excellent results on super-noisy RED footage using either Neat video or Resolve's internal denoiser. Neat will set everything for you automatically, in Resolve's denoiser start with Temporal (5 frames, Mo. est.type - better) and push it right before the artifacts come. Then go to the Spatial (mode - better or enhanced) and push it until you satisfy. Nothing special with RED, just dose the impact. For basic noise level I use 5-7 Temporal and no Spatial.

[Alex Winker]

Thanks Misha.

4 hours ago, Misha Denisov said:

For basic noise level I use 5-7 Temporal and no Spatial.

So you generally do this on almost all red footage?

[Misha Denisov]

I do grading first and if the noise emerges, I add a noise reduction node before everything. I am not often working with RED footages, but they are noisy, fact. So usually 5-7 of temporal NR will not affect image details and quality, but reduce noise significantly. You will see it)

[Stef Colosi]

You can also split the signal and look at each channel individually, its often the case that 1 or 2 channels have noticeably more noise (often the blue channel) and then apply more NR to that specific channel.

[Alex Winker]

Thanks for the input!

[dermot.shane]

some thoughts;

- really depends on the chip used, not all red camera's need the same processing, a Helium is not a RED1....

- i do not find any modern RED to be noisier than any other good camera, at the least, not objectionably noisy

- i tend to avoid noise reduction unless really, really needed, and then i turn it up until i can see the scopes start to clear up, then cut the values in half

- the exception being using Clairity in Nucoda

- Paul Dore has a usefull OFX that displays noise per channel