Extreme Noise Removal!

I’m cleaning up some nightime drone shots. This is a small section of the image after running it through Neat Video, then exporting and running through Video Enhancer AI. Loving the results.


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If you don’t own or use Neat Video, you’re missing out.

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Pure Voodoo. It is incredible.

Madness. We really are approaching the classic 90’s film line “now zoom and enhance”.

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More extreme noise removal. this time an iPhone shooting slomo in very low light with tons of noise.

Ran it through neat video, then export to Topaz and render with their new Iris model. Pretty happy with the result.

(Need to force YouTube to play at highest quality to see it)

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Topaz Video AI has a new noise removal model that seems to be better than Neat Video:

Orig:

Neat:

Topaz - Nyx model:

(Brightness massively increased for clarity)

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How does topaz fit into the workflow? Can you interface with it through flame or is it stand-alone?

I use Topaz as a stand-alone app, I’m not aware of any Flame integration.

-Ted

Is it good temporally? (Video as opposed to stills)

Not 100% about temporal noise, but I just used it to blow 4k up to 8k so we could do an extreme crop and it’s decent with inventing details. Better than any tricks in Flame at least. It’s slow and the interface is bare bones.

@ytf Yeah there’s no Flame integration unfortunately. You can roundtrip from Flame in either ProRes or EXR.
@bryanb The temporal consistency is great.

For me it’s an absolute integral part of my workflow. I like to work with absolutely perfect, noiseless images, and previously a combo of neat video and Topaz did that. Now however that entire prep process may just be done in Topaz.

What was the combo? You mean doubling up on noise reduction? Or you were using topaz for x and neat video for y?

Yeah it’s a combo of completely denoising the image and zinging it up with AI.

This is my typical process, if I was working from say 4k RAW files:

Bring the RAW files in to Flame and Denoise with neat video in the native colourspace.
View Transform to REC709 (The AI models work best in normal video colourspace)
Export as EXR or ProRes XQ sequence
Load in to Topaz and upscale to 8k using the Iris model
Bring back in to Flame and resize down to 4k, view transform to ACES or whatever and work from there.

It might seem like a weird workflow, but if you do that and look at the before and after of your images you will see a huge difference. Perfectly crisp noiseless images, beautiful clean detail, it gives it a slightly hyperreal, too good to be true look.

Obviously you can’t do this when working on shots where the image integrity has to be preserved and delivered back as source, ie features and series. But if you’re on a project where you’re in charge of just making it look amazing, this is a top technique to prep your shots before comping.

You can also use this technique if working from already graded files, just skip the view transform in the second step.

Also this technique is great for green screen too, completely removing the noise from the image, and crisping up the edges before you start keying.

This is so much cleaner to work from:

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