Keep in mind that when doing any color correction process it is important to utilize an external editing monitor.

Perfect, just the right type of footage to test the Neat Video Reduce Noise filter. As you can imagine, the amount of video noise that was created made some of the video almost unusable. The throw of light from the Micro Pro was very limited. The walls were painted mustard green and I was limited to a small Litepanel's Micro Pro on my cams hot shoe. It was like shooting a candle lit dinner, only worse. Both side areas, where the guests were seated, had no lights at all. The horribly dark hall came with a few fluorescent lights roughly 45 ft overhead whose light barely reached the head table seating the wedding party. Having to fly to Canada, I had no opportunity to scope out the reception area before hand, and therefore didn't have a clue as to the conditions I would be shooting in. This is all possible because the noise reducer processes the video in multiple spatial frequency ranges with the optional ability to individually analyze and process separate color channels.Īs a favor, I recently shot my first wedding video. This profile can then be saved to Neat Video's own custom noise profile settings and applied to another clip shot under the same or similar lighting conditions. Once the profile has been previewed in Neat Video's own preview window you simply click on apply, with the resultant highly reduced noise. It takes some initial experimenting but with just a little bit of effort it is not that difficult. Building an accurate noise profile is perhaps the most important step to achieve accurate noise reduction with Neat Video. This analysis is almost immediate as it creates a profile of the area you have selected.

Neat Video works by analyzing a portion of a frame of video containing no detailed image or color gradation. There is also a Demo plug available on Neat Video's site, however it has limited functionality. There are two versions of the Noise Reducer, the Home plug-in which can accommodate data with up to DVD-size frames, and the Pro version which can handle any frame size and is the one to get. In case you're feeling a bit lazy today and don't feel like reading this whole review, let me then start off by saying that Neat Video's Noise Reduction plug in is, by far, the best I have seen to date, bar none.Ĭoming in both Mac and PC versions, the Mac version requiring an Intel Core/Core 2 or Power PC G4/G5 processor running Mac OSX 10.4+ and a minimum of 1GB ram and a display of 1024x748, Neat Video is fully compatible for Final Cut Pro 6/7, Motion 3/4, Final Cut Express with a separate Neat Video Plug in for Adobe After Effects. There are a number of 'reduce noise' filters produced by several 3rd party plug in companies, certainly some are better than others and, based upon my experience, some are almost completely ineffective. The bane of all videographers is the video noise created as a result of many factors, one of the greatest of which is the noise resultant from shooting in low light situations.

Neat video final cut pro