A whole new camera? [Archive]

Evin Grant

06-09-2009, 05:02 PM

I have owned my Red one since Dec. 31st 2007. I have shot and been a part of many high end productions that have been "shot on Red" so very little about the workflow surprises me anymore. I would also consider myself pretty liberal with exposure, routinely shooting at 400 (base) ISO, especially with 5600K lighting, which I have become accustomed too. So I hope you won't think me too "fanboy" or just plain barking mad when I say that I may have just discovered a whole new camera in my camera. In fact a whole new camera that I've had for a year and a half and all the footage I've ever shot with it is also new. OK, here's the rub (there always is one)...

...The new camera comes in two parts.
The first is the new Red Color science and is free but not released except to us test pilots, although that will change soon.
The second costs $100, and you'll need to put in some serious render time.

OK now you have the set up, here's the payoff...
I shot a little project for a director friend of mine a few weeks ago. It's supposed to be a night exterior, warm/cool deal and I had the entire lighting set-up worked out using those blue screen Kino bulbs, which were ordered but somehow got left out of the case and nobody bothered to check the order on pickup. Long story short to get the look the director wanted I had to blue gel the fuck out of a 4x4 Kino and push it through a soft frost leaving me with an exposure of T2 at about 1000 ISO 360º shutter. The noise didn't bother the director that much so we rolled with it. I figured we would have to run it through some heavy iron just to get it to look watchable, but it was what it was.

So tonight, feeling adventurous I ran the footage through the new color science in RA 3.72B and was very encouraged. The overall noise was at about a 1/2 stop better, but the most important difference was the reduction of the splotchyness in the blue channel. Again I wouldn't have characterized this as night and day at this exposure when played side by side but it was a significant improvement. Then a light bulb went off in my head, the biggest obstacle I have always had with noise reduction software is that splotchy blue channel, which always needs to be blurred to hell to fix and ends up killing all the detail. Enter the NeatVideo Pro plug-in (available for FCP, AE and AP). This is the video version of the NeatImage still noise reduction filter and the new Pro version that just came out in April supports 16 bit and 2K+ resolutions.
Sufficed to say the proof is in the pudding...

This is a full res 2K file so be patient, it'll be worth it.
(410MB 20sec 2K 2:1 Apple PR422 file, Cntrl/left click to download)
http://www.evingrant/com/flicks/JW_Noise.mov (http://www.evingrant.com/flicks/JW_Noise.mov)

http://www.evingrant.com/pics/ERG01.jpg
http://www.evingrant.com/pics/ERG02.jpg

The real thorn here is render time, the NeatVideo plug-in is amazing, this puts the Red one squarely in 5DMII territory now, but to get there will cost you about 45min of rendering for every minute of footage:yikes: (Mac Pro 3.0Ghz 8core, 12GB ram). The new Nahlems will probably really help and it may be faster in AE but still. I won't be shooting everything two stops under from now on but I also won't be afraid of the dark either.

Raul Gonzo

06-09-2009, 05:08 PM

Thanks Evin, your posts are very informative. I have been thinking the same thing since I tested as well. I have heard many good things about NeatVideo and I can see it really works wonders.

Harry Lipnick

06-09-2009, 05:11 PM

Dude...that's phenomenal. Like you said, not something to plan for, but incredible the tools that RED and others have provided for us to fall back on when we need them. Thanks for being very thorough as well. Ain't it a pain when you know that one light you *really* need is just sitting there in the rental dock?
Peace,

-Harry

Jay A. Kelley

06-09-2009, 05:18 PM

If you look in the shot on RED thread at the music video I posted, the neatvideo plugin saved this project from disaster. Also if you look at all the MCU shots of the singer, you might be surprised to find out that these shots were done during a massive down pour!

We could not ADD rain to the shots that did not have it, so we used the neatvideo to REMOVE rain.. And it worked about 90% of what we needed.

I will say, if you find yourself shooting in a situation where you think noise will be a factor, make sure you take a large black flag and shoot it with the flag covering at least 25% of your frame. The software will need to take a "noise profile" and needs a solid black area to do it. The profile is the noise pattern of the camera and does not change shot to shot. However, the chroma characteristics do, so get as many "profile shots" for noise as you can.

The link to the music video is: http://www.vimeo.com/5008519

Like so many of you the client wanted a "big look" with little money. Weather was NOT kind to us at all, and we were sorely lacking in light on the night we had to shoot the singer. Then the rain started and due to some crew mistakes, we lost two of our lights. So we pushed the hell out of our picture, and it was noisy as hell.

We could not go back to reshoot. This plugin saved our asses. We used it on all shots of the singer which had serious problems.

I came across the neat video plug in and tried it out. Since I work in Cineform 4:4:4 the rendering was not TOO bad, but Evin's right, it's slow. I will say also be sure to use ADVANCED mode and set your color space to RGB.. You get a lot more control that way.

As I got better with the plug in I also discovered it's a WONDERFUL softening filter. We had some bad makeup with an actress, and with a little work this plugin smoothed her out without costing me a lot of detail.

It rocks.

Jay

Bruce Allen

06-09-2009, 06:40 PM

I've used noise reduction on every RED job I've ever done, since 2007.

NeatVideo is currently my favorite too.

EDIT: beware, though - it also removes compression artifacts from RED's competitors ;)

There is a reason Cameron, Fincher, etc all use the Lowry process now.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Kenn Michael

06-09-2009, 06:50 PM

Yes, NeatVideo is magic!

Evin Grant

06-09-2009, 06:57 PM

There is a reason Cameron, Fincher, etc all use the Lowry process now.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Is this related to NeatVideo? I wondered how Benjamin Button Looked so clean when I know how gritty the Viper looks out of the camera.

Evin Grant

06-09-2009, 07:01 PM

Never mind I found it...
http://www.lowrydigital.com/noise.html

Bruce Allen

06-09-2009, 07:02 PM

Is this related to NeatVideo? I wondered how Benjamin Button Looked so clean when I know how gritty the Viper looks out of the camera.

The Lowry process is basically the same concept as NeatVideo except running on a crazy supercomputer.

It looks from frame to frame and tries do intentify what is noise and what is picture information.

The Lowry process does a certain amount of super-resolution I think - eg it combines information from multiple frames to build a higher resolution image than any one frame.

Originally developed to help with film scans - now used heavily on digital.

I agree that NeatVideo is pretty neat though! So far if used properly it beats all the others I've tried. You can get more complex and set it up to work in multiple passes but then you're trading off even more CPU time.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Mark Phelan

06-09-2009, 07:21 PM

Evin,

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the demo version and tried it on an old clip that I had shot indoors that shows lots of noise due to the low light. Holy cow! What a dramatic difference. I've purchased the plugin to add to the mix. I like CYA software like this. Makes me look like I almost have a clue... Thanks again!

Mark

albert rudnicki

06-09-2009, 08:13 PM

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/assets/download/Videofuturelowryprocess.pdf

Evin Grant

06-09-2009, 09:06 PM

That's from 2004, so I'm sure the process has been updated a bit but it gives us a rough idea.

NateWeaver

06-09-2009, 09:45 PM

I think my question is why wouldn't you just use NeatVideo on a completed product?

My guess is that it probably doesn't do quite as good of a job, but I like grading with R3Ds, it allows other nice things to happen.

Alex.Mitchell

06-09-2009, 10:06 PM

That was a really dramatic different. Thanks for sharing Evin!

Michael Schmitt

06-09-2009, 10:30 PM

Holy crap, Evin, that's amazing!

michael zaletel

06-09-2009, 11:04 PM

Thanks for the tip Evan. I had bookmarked Neat Video after reading another thread a while back but never did feel confident enough about it to purchase. Purchased just now. :)

Does anyone know if the AE or Premiere Neat Video Plug-in is faster than the FCP plug-in on same footage with same settings on same computer?

-michael zaletel
(shooter)

Evin Grant

06-10-2009, 03:12 AM

I think my question is why wouldn't you just use NeatVideo on a completed product?

I think that is what I'm saying. It would be the last step after color correction and output to Prores or DPX.
Some testing is probably in order though.

Mark Phelan

06-10-2009, 03:29 AM

I think that is what I'm saying. It would be the last step after color correction and output to Prores or DPX.
Some testing is probably in order though.

I'm sitting here with a smile on my face nodding in agreement. The clip I tried the demo on is now being crunched by the purchased version in FCP and the clip being a tad over eight minutes long is supposed to take "about 3 hours" to render. I would only want to do this to clips that were desperate and have no hope, except for this type of salvage. The real solution is to not get myself in the situation again, if at all possible. "We'll fix it in post..." is not the solution for good shooting.

David Nardini

06-10-2009, 03:30 AM

EDIT: beware, though - it also removes compression artifacts from RED's competitors ;)
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Indeed ... it does do a good job on 5Dii material also ;-) ... but does NOT fix the moire.

For what it's worth, I could not get good (and reliable) performamce on Mac FCP (flaky), Motion (never worked). On Mac AE it's been stable and batch rendering is a breeze.
Neat Video heritage is PC so on that platform its rock solid.

Simon Valderrama

06-10-2009, 05:43 AM

Curran Giddens

06-10-2009, 07:36 AM

Purchased just now. :)

The $99 price makes it an easy decision. You can go ahead and buy it as a "just in case." If it was $200-300, I would only ever buy it if it was absolutely necessary.

Does anyone know if the AE or Premiere Neat Video Plug-in is faster than the FCP plug-in on same footage with same settings on same computer?

Also, how would the FCP version work for 4K footage since FCP doesn't support anything over 4000 pixels? I will probably go with the AE version also for stability reasons. Too bad there isn't a standalone version.

zak forrest

06-11-2009, 12:37 PM

Is this related to NeatVideo? I wondered how Benjamin Button Looked so clean when I know how gritty the Viper looks out of the camera.

panic room too, shot on film..

Mike Zinner

06-11-2009, 02:01 PM

Wow, this is truly amazing. What about getting the NeatVideo algorythm (or let Graeme do a better one) into the RED Rocket and do it in real time? Or right into Epic and Scarlet where it belongs in the first place ;)

Mike

Roberto Lequeux

06-11-2009, 02:58 PM

Evin, thanks for sharing! I use Neat Image for stills with quite a bit of success but I dial it all in manually. How does this work with video? Is it all automatic? And could you please post a very short before and after 1080 H.264 if you have the files readily available? Just a few seconds of each if it isn't too much trouble. (or is the 2k a before and after? I better check)

Wow, this is truly amazing. What about getting the NeatVideo algorythm (or let Graeme do a better one) into the RED Rocket and do it in real time? Or right into Epic and Scarlet where it belongs in the first place ;)

Mike

I was thinking along these lines yesterday night then woke up wondering about it. Maybe Red needs to get on with delivering a real 1001% timing application. My guess is that Graeme is swamped as hell and will be for a VERY long time, but perhaps he could oversee a team developing such a thing. There would be no substitute for Red developing Red timing tools.

I mean, it makes so much gosh darn rational sense! Let the digital camera makers employ the developers themselves, then part of each camera system will be the timing tools! It is all one thing in my mind's eye...

cinemano

06-11-2009, 03:26 PM

I feel the filtered one, although grain is removed, kinda looks soft. I guess the grain, however unpleasant it may be, gives it an illusion of sharpness perhaps?

Roberto Lequeux

06-11-2009, 03:39 PM

Bruce Allen

06-11-2009, 04:17 PM

I finally watched it, thanks for the before and after Evin. I think it is softer in all the right places.

I would really appreciate hearing a bit on how the filter is applied, manual vs. auto and so on.

For best results you want to tweak it - you won't get optimal results if you use the same settings for that 320ASA outside footage as you do for the 800ASA tungsten stuff...

To get it started you can feed it a piece of a frame with ONLY noise (eg no detail) and it uses that to calibrate.

After that there is another page of settings you can tweak.

This is only for the noise reduction that takes place inside one frame. The setting for how much info to use from the frames before and afterwards is separate.

Download the demo!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Evin Grant

06-11-2009, 04:23 PM

That first test is in stupid mode, I've gotten it much more fine tuned in the last few days.
The advanced mode is definitely the way to go but be prepared for some trial and error.
I'd recommend cutting a 5 second test clip and test rendering a few different combinations to see what works for you.

Mike Harrington

06-11-2009, 08:55 PM

Did anyone ever compare the NeatVideo plugin with Furnace DeNoise and MotionSmooth plugin in Nuke?
Furnace DeNoise does motion estimation, i'm still training on finetuning the plugin parameters but results are very good.
Wonder if NeatVideo has some advantages over Furnace plugins ...

i know a lot of compositers on the fusion and nuke forums running furnace that actually prefer the neatvideo plugin.....and the cost is a small fraction

Roberto Lequeux

06-12-2009, 01:25 AM

To get it started you can feed it a piece of a frame with ONLY noise (eg no detail) and it uses that to calibrate.

Very interesting, and promising.

The advanced mode is definitely the way to go but be prepared for some trial and error.
I'd recommend cutting a 5 second test clip and test rendering a few different combinations to see what works for you.

Sounds like a lot of work, especially to get it to match shot to shot. Perhaps we should try to lock the lighting setup for the scene and only tweak a little from setup to setup..? Any tips for production?

Rick Darge

06-12-2009, 02:36 AM

That's incredible Evin!

Thanks for sharing! $99 is a no brainer

Tom Gough

06-12-2009, 03:36 AM

Hi all,

Found this on Neat Videos site:

"Neat Video supports the industry standard video data types and file formats:

8-bit per channel (24-bit RGB) rendering is supported by all versions of Neat Video plug-ins for After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut, VirtualDub, Sony Vegas and Pinnacle Studio

16-bit per channel (48-bit RGB) rendering is supported by Neat Video Pro plug-in for After Effects and Premiere"

So does this mean if I want more accuracy in colours and no banding issues I should go for the AE or Premiere version??

Thanks,

Tom

Evin Grant

06-12-2009, 03:46 AM

That seems to be true for the FCP plug-in, but if it's the last thing you apply it shouldn't ad banding or degrade the image. You should do your CC first for precision anyway.

Brian D. Goff

06-12-2009, 04:01 AM

That seems to be true for the FCP plug-in, but if it's the last thing you apply it shouldn't ad banding or degrade the image. You should do your CC first for precision anyway.

I found that I get the best results when adding the filter directly to the .r3d files in AE, as the very first filter (bottom right picture). The picture atached is pushed to 2000asa.

Curran Giddens

06-12-2009, 06:30 AM

I found that I get the best results when adding the filter directly to the .r3d files in AE...

Thanks. That's what I was thinking.

Mark Phelan

06-12-2009, 06:38 AM

To follow up on Evin's suggestion, through my limited testing, I thought I'd pass along a mention that if you use the NeatVideo filter before everything in FCP, every time you make an additional change, the render time is still ridiculously long. So you could be adding to your pain by multiplying the render effect each time you decide to make a tweak. Food for thought.

Ryan E. Walters

06-12-2009, 07:17 AM

A while back I ran some tests comparing 5 different noise reduction plugins and at that time I thought that Neat Video was the winner- and with the new color science it makes it even more so!

If you want to see the comparison footage, you can check it out here:
http://www.vimeo.com/3896923

JonathanF

06-12-2009, 01:24 PM

Jay A. Kelley

06-15-2009, 08:12 PM

I use it with my Cineform Files... It's excellent

Gavin Greenwalt

06-15-2009, 09:29 PM

I feel the filtered one, although grain is removed, kinda looks soft. I guess the grain, however unpleasant it may be, gives it an illusion of sharpness perhaps?

Definitely. But then you can just add grain back on top just to bring back some of the sharpness. But this time under your control.

Charles Angus

06-15-2009, 10:08 PM

That seems to be true for the FCP plug-in, but if it's the last thing you apply it shouldn't ad banding or degrade the image. You should do your CC first for precision anyway.

I would do grain/noise removal before CC, but grain addition after CC. That way, the optical flow in the noise reducer is dealing with untouched picture (which I believe it would prefer - easier to calculate vectors, and the noise/grain has not been magnified or altered to different degrees between clips), and the added grain is not being altered/magnified by the CC.

But feel free to call me crazy.

Uli Plank

06-15-2009, 10:49 PM

Evin Grant

06-15-2009, 10:55 PM

I would do grain/noise removal before CC, but grain addition after CC. That way, the optical flow in the noise reducer is dealing with untouched picture (which I believe it would prefer - easier to calculate vectors, and the noise/grain has not been magnified or altered to different degrees between clips), and the added grain is not being altered/magnified by the CC.

But feel free to call me crazy.

If you have the luxury of 10bit DPX capable CC workflow by all means NR filter first. But if you're leveraging the RAW capabilities in Color you're probably better doing it on output.

Shawn Nelson

06-15-2009, 11:06 PM

whoa, just caught this thread. Wow! Thanks for this write-up Evin, downloading the clip now

M. Bergeron

06-15-2009, 11:25 PM

The developer suggests to calibrate the camera with one of the charts used for NeatImage.

http://www.neatimage.com/testtarget.html

You can shoot an LCD directly for that purpose.

He explained to me in a email that when you select one patch, the software checks for other regions (different colors) automatically. Similar to Noise Ninja but transparent to the user. It is not just done from one gray patch hence the good idea to calibrate the camera with the chart at different ISO.

Dave Blackham

06-16-2009, 12:26 AM

Are there any view to the Innobits purifier software for this sort of work.

It works very well on digital noise but I dont have any tests agaist Innobits or other offerings.

Dave

The Lowry process is basically the same concept as NeatVideo except running on a crazy supercomputer.

It looks from frame to frame and tries do intentify what is noise and what is picture information.

The Lowry process does a certain amount of super-resolution I think - eg it combines information from multiple frames to build a higher resolution image than any one frame.

Originally developed to help with film scans - now used heavily on digital.

I agree that NeatVideo is pretty neat though! So far if used properly it beats all the others I've tried. You can get more complex and set it up to work in multiple passes but then you're trading off even more CPU time.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Ivan Cortazar

06-16-2009, 08:16 AM

I like Neatvideo the best from all noise reducers, but have some problems on the Mac.

I expected it to perform best on unaltered 4K in AE as well, but even the latest version of AE get's very unstable with Neatvideo, crashing after a few frames. I tried the "flush cache after every frame" trick to no avail.
Much more stable in 2K, but still not perfect in 16 bit, I need to render in smaller chunks.

Anybody experiencing similar problems?

Same here. Can't render 4K. In that case I render a 2K of the comp and apply the Neat Image. I contact Neat Image staff and they said that they needed to get a copy of the footage i was working, but didn't have the time to go with the procees. I might do it next week.

I love Neat Image but for 4K footage it is unusable in AE.

Curran Giddens

06-16-2009, 08:49 AM

Same here. Can't render 4K....
I love Neat Image but for 4K footage it is unusable in AE.

Are you trying it on the native R3D files? Have you or anyone tried it with 4K TIFF image sequences?

Bruce Allen

06-16-2009, 10:48 AM

Are you trying it on the native R3D files? Have you or anyone tried it with 4K TIFF image sequences?

Yes, I have. Hit problems. But many things in After Effects have problems at 4K. CS5 will fix that.

Until then, work at 2K / 3K. 4K is unnecessary.

Are there any view to the Innobits purifier software for this sort of work.

It works very well on digital noise but I dont have any tests agaist Innobits or other offerings.

They all work - Sapphire, Tinderbox/Furnace, After Effects Grain Removal (based on Grain Surgery), etc - just Neat Image is the best I've found so far.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

patrickortman

06-16-2009, 10:58 AM

Background: I've been in post hell for weeks with a little promo that should have been posted in just a few days. The problem: hideous noise. Yes, it's not all the RED's fault- this was shot in a greenscreen stage where the stage manager was unable to light so that the camera got a proper exposure. I estimate we were a full stop under where we needed to be. And it was under tungsten lighting! Even the 80D filter wasn't helpful, given this situation.

The RED AR update was cool. But not enough, since we didn't shoot on build 20, and I can't afford to go back and redo it. But this, guys, this little $100 plugin from Neat Video may in fact save the shoot.

I downloaded the demo, it blew me away. I bought the pro plugin, it's looking stunning in After Effects.

It's rendering a TIF sequence now, so I can bring it into Shake. But by bringing in a few stills in Shake that have been processed from the AE version of NeatVideo: WOW.

My nodetree in Shake had a Keylight and Primatte, and a ton of roto.

With these new stills, it's one click in Primatte only. And I'm talking wispy hair keys, guys.

Thank God. This could be- if the motion tests I'm doing once this sequence fully renders hold up- the holy grail for cruddy footage. Yay!

Paul Leeming

06-17-2009, 09:20 AM

The RED AR update was cool. But not enough, since we didn't shoot on build 20, and I can't afford to go back and redo it.
The beauty of the new colour science is that you actually CAN go back to earlier footage and reap the benefits of the new debayering etc.

But if you are really stuck for time then yes, you are best working with what you have rendered already.

NeatVideo sounds like it's well worth the $99 anyway! Will keep it in mind if I ever need to save a shoot....

Cheers all,

Paul

paul gill

06-17-2009, 03:02 PM

i don't get something.

jim said that the noise improvements are not made in software so how can you apply these benefits on old footage if it is in camera?

Kenneth Elkington

06-17-2009, 04:54 PM

i don't get something.

jim said that the noise improvements are not made in software so how can you apply these benefits on old footage if it is in camera?

You got it backwards, the improvements come from development of the debayering algorithms.

Mark Phelan

07-11-2009, 09:05 PM

Here's a frame showing before and after the noise filter being applied. I don't have an issue with the noise in this particular shot, but wanted to see what would change if I wanted to apply the filter. Edit: They're showing transposed, so the filtered version is on the left.

Michel Hafner

07-12-2009, 02:13 AM

Roberto Lequeux

07-12-2009, 03:17 AM

So will you get the best possible results with Neat Video by creating a profile with the charts? I suppose you still get better results by manually tweaking each shot, right?