New Video: Denoise

Denoise from Tom Baurain on Vimeo.

Music: “In Motion” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Amazon MP3 | iTunes

If you’ve been following my blog or Twitter you’ve probably seen me tweet a few times about Magic Bullet Denoiser, a great new product from the folks at Red Giant Software. The post below this one gets into the basics of the program. This video is a better example of what Denoiser can do.

It’s not all gumdrops and lollipops, unfortunately. Denoiser is a great product, but it is not perfect. One should never expect that of a product but Denoiser certainly does a fine job. Those with a trained eye may notice some compression artifacts in the video. By this point my patience was completely gone and it does what I set out for it to do. It’s not what I wanted it to be, but it comes close.

Now we get down to the nitty gritty of the flaws of Denoiser. I can tell you right now that “Cannot Sample Frame” is an error you will curse many times. In Final Cut Pro I found Denoiser almost unusable. I came up with a few workarounds but Denoiser definitely has room to improve. Perhaps it is just FCP showing it’s age. I’m honestly not sure and would love to be corrected in the comments if anyone knows for sure. These are my best guesses. I am running the latest version of Final Cut Pro.

There would always be a certain point in the timeline where I would run into the infamous “Out of Memory” error and Denoiser would refuse to render. I tried several common workarounds for the “Out of Memory” error and closed all other projects, timelines, and even made FCP the only program I was running. At 8GB of RAM my user experience was hardly what I would call good. One thing I should mention is that the “Cannot Sample Frame” error will completely kill your job in Compressor, while this same error in After Effects won’t wreck your render and completes the job just fine.

To alleviate my woes I set After Effects CS4 to the task of “denoising” my footage. AE proved to be much more reliable in this task. For a workflow that involved an actual project with deadlines I would most certainly rely on After Effects over Final Cut Pro. I would also denoise the clips in need first, as this task should be performed before color correction. Another thing worth mentioning is how RAM intensive the plugin is itself – it’s not what I’d call fast.

Don’t take my words as all doom and gloom – FCP did handle around half my clips with Denoiser applied just fine. The render times were pretty bad, but at least it worked. My timeline ended up being 3:31, so you have an idea of what I was working with. Denoiser’s fine tuning options are definitely well thought out, kudos to Red Giant Software. The options I found myself coming back to again and again were “Enhance, Shadow Offset,” and the actual effect itself. Shadow Offset really saved me on a timelapse recently – it was long exposure so there were variable amounts of light in each frame, which resulted in the shadows for part of the timelapse being very “blocky.” Adjusting the Shadow Offset property saved me on that.

Chroma Smoothing was a bit tricky, at least for me – I usually left it alone. Most of the time it made the footage I shot look worse. Honestly I was surprised at what Denoiser could do with the footage I shot at ISO’s 3200 and 6400. It wasn’t perfect, especially at ISO 6400, but it was better than I was expecting. Now I’m not saying my EOS Rebel T2i is as good as a 1DMKIV, but footage shot at 1600 and 3200 is definitely usable depending on what lighting conditions you are shooting in.

Another thing I noticed was the “smoothing” in general it did. Like I said in my previous blog, there is such a thing as too much, but the more I looked at my footage there is a definite “smoothing” of things. How much is too much is definitely up to you. The most noticeable common area for me was on skin. It was almost like skin being smoothed in Photoshop, though definitely not as over the top as some fashion magazines that get dissected on the internet. It’s not a negative, in my opinion, but definitely something worth noting.

Again let me reiterate that color correction should be done after Denoiser has been applied. I did no color correction on this particular project. I made that choice so that the viewer could get a better idea of what things are like with just Denoiser applied. Hopefully you enjoyed the video! I wanted to use “In Motion” from The Social Network soundtrack and it fit this little side project. If you were wondering, all clips were shot at f2.8 on a Tokina 11-16mm lens. I love the way that lens flares, especially at ISO 3200.

Cheers!