NeatVideo: Noise reduction that's actually worth using

Noise reduction has a bad reputation, because most of it is crap. The number of people that abuse it and turn noisy video into annoyingly processed video appears to be quite large. So imagine my delight when I first discovered NeatVideo last November. This filter is so good that I now use it exclusively whenever I need noise reduction. Standard NR filters often simply cut off certain frequencies in the picture, making it look like a watercolour painting (the "MPEG NR" features in most TVs are implemented in this way), or simply smooth rapidly moving areas which look like they might be noisy. NeatVideo is a hell of a lot smarter than this. The reason it works so well is that it first requires that you create a "noise snapshot", that is, show it exactly what you want it to get rid of. To do this, NeatVideo asks you to highlight a featureless area of your video that's covered in noise: for example, an untextured white wall. Once it has this, the filter has a really good idea of what to get rid of, and what to keep.

It tackles noise in two ways: in single frames, and across multiple frames (spatially and temporally). When you first launch the filter, you're shown options for the temporal filter. Even on its own, this is pretty effective, because it too uses the noise snapshot for decision making. You can tell it to smooth noise across 0-5 frames, and also adjust the "Treshold" (from -100% to +150%) for fine-tuning. One thing I've noticed about the temporal function is that it doesn't leave artefacts, provided you've given it an accurate noise snapshot (it can make some wonderfully screwed up abstract art if you haven't!). The filter seems to know when to stop, and backs itself off in situations where other filters create trails/motion blur.

The spatial filter is configured by clicking the "Configure" button. From here, a new window launches, where you define the noise snapshot (or load a previously created one), and then fine-tune the spatial filter settings. NeatVideo has an advanced mode which allows you to alter the settings for each video component (Y, Cb or Cr) - specific to the high, middle, and low frequencies. Truth be told, I've never needed to use this, and prefer using the filter in basic mode, which simply lets you control the amount of reduction in the Brightness component (Y) or in both colour components (Cb and Cr). If you want, you can choose to only attack the colour components, and leave the black and white portion of the video alone. This is a complete lifesaver. Anyone who's shot video in low light conditions with anything other than a 3CCD camcorder will know that it can result in a mess of coloured red, green and blue mush. NeatVideo lets you remove the reddiness, greeniness and blue-i-ness of said mush, leaving you with something that looks much more like natural film grain. Or you can attack the Brightness component too and be rid of it, as well. There's a price to be paid for this quality, though: NeatVideo is cripplingly slow. Depending on whether you use the spatial filter, temporal filter, or more likely both, NeatVideo crunches through about 4-5 frames per second of standard-def video on my overclocked Intel Core 2 Quad (~3ghz), and 1 frame or less per second of 1080p HD. But, given it's affordability, and the improvement in quality it offers, that doesn't really bother me: just queue up some clips and leave it on overnight (or over a few nights). Anyway, take a look at the results of this ugly-looking stack of tapes. The before parts of the image are surrounded by a faint white outline. Most of the image is the processed result.

And here's the view which lets you see a contrast-boosted view of exactly what you're removing. Yikes!

NeatVideo comes in a few different versions, priced accordingly. The free version is limited and not of much use to most of us. The standard version, priced at $50 US, processes standard def video - any resolution you want up to Digital PAL (720x576). The step-up version has no limit on resolution and costs $100, so is the one you'll need for High Def video. You can also upgrade to the HD version at any time, like I did. Better yet, NeatVideo can be used in a huge number of applications: take your pick from a version designed for Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas (both the Pro and Consumer versions), VirtualDub (which can also be used with AVISynth's LoadVirtualDubPlugin command), and Pinnacle Studio.

If you shoot video on anything other than a top of the range pro camera - and maybe even if you do that too - or if you want to clean up ugly old VHS recordings - then buy it!