Editing Beyond Ilm Summit
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Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes
If you haven’t seen the latest lecture from IlmCast titled “Beyond Ilm Summit” then I recommend you watch it below.
The above video was shot with a Canon GL2 and Canon FS100. Unfortunately the lighting was all that great in the room and neither cameras are really any good for low light shooting so I found myself in a slight post production blunder. When I tried adjusting the levels control, hue and saturation the noise artifacts (the small colorful floating pixels) increased dramatically to the point where it was dead on distracting.
During the editing process I came across the Neat Video Noise Reduction Plug-in for Premiere and After Effects. I figured I’ll give it a try. I made the purchase and applied the effect. Below are the before and after images that are shown from the use of the plug-in.
When a plug-in like this is used every frame of the video is altered. This video is a little over an hour in length. Normally render time would be anywhere between eight to ten hours, but with the noise reduction plug-in in effect caused the render time to be about 115 hours. That’s right…one hundred and fifteen continuous hours of rendering on my machine which is a dual-core Pentium. That’s almost five solid days!
The other down side of using this plugin was that any movement by the talent on screen was unintentionally given a motion blur effect. Although the motion blur looks cool, in my opinnion it isn’t appropriate for a video such as this. It tends to be distracting from what’s being said.
Saad Malik Says: 04.09.08 at 5:51 am
What were your render settings?
AlBaraa Says: 04.09.08 at 7:51 am
I initially exported it as an uncompressed AVI file deinterlaced. After that I encoded it to WMV with the IlmCast intro and outro video at 1500 Kbs and then an FLV file at 400 Kbs.
Basil Mohamed Gohar Says: 04.09.08 at 8:55 am
There are numerous noise-reduction plug-ins/filters for the free-and-open-source video editor VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/). Based on the description you gave (i.e., motion blurring), it seems that the noise reduction method used by that plug-is temporal-based – meaning that it only keeps data that is consistent frame-by-frame, which noise isn’t, and also averages motion over time, which is where the blur comes from.
I noticed they also have a plug-in available for VirtualDub. Interesting…
SaqibSaab Says: 09.09.08 at 2:03 pm
EGADS, man. This scares me, because I’m upgrading my Pentium 4 to a Quad Core soon inshaAllah, namely because of low render speeds. I guess the important lesson is to always have good lighting. Nice effect, btw.
AlBaraa Says: 09.09.08 at 2:29 pm
I was planning on upgrading my machine to an Intel Core2Quad Q6600 but postponed the upgrade to October since this month’s budget is going toward some training I’ll be attending (will blog about that soon).
Ideally I’d love to get an Intel DX5400 Motherboard running with two Intel Core2Extreme processors with 8GB of FS-DIMMs. Down side is that it would run me ~$2000 and thats not counting the 1200 Watt PSU needed to run that behemoth which will cost another $600. Here’s the thing, If you’re gonna have such a power house, then you need to get yourself an ATI 4870×2 ($300 each?) along with a Dell 2408WFP monitor (~$690).
Now if you really have the above system, then might as well go for HD editing…purchase a Matrox.X2 (~$1500) and a SATA storage toward of 8TB (~$1500)…then you’re ballin
I’m prob not going to do that…
My most likely upgrade in October will be:
- Intel Core2Quad 6600 an P35 based mobo (now that P45 is out P35 is cheaper)
- ATI 4850 video card
- Dell 2408WFP Monitor
Perhaps before the end of the year I’ll get myself a Matrox RT.X2 if I end up with an HVX170.
SaqibSaab Says: 09.09.08 at 3:36 pm
Man, a Matrox X2… I wish
AlBaraa Says: 09.09.08 at 3:56 pm
You think the X2 is great? Imagine having a Matrox AXIO. That is an HD rendering MONSTER! Surpassing some of the lower grade AVID rendering hardware…
…but it will also run about $5000
rizAK Says: 07.10.08 at 10:16 am
What are your current machines specs?
It’s october bro! =D!!!
rizAK Says: 07.10.08 at 10:20 am
Also, that filter is pretty sweet! I was wondering… if you had to render for a gig, would it be fair to charge for render-time? Hmm or even capture time?
In that case… stick to DV LOL
AlBaraa Says: 07.10.08 at 3:32 pm
I haven’t upgraded the computer yet. Sometimes I tend to fall into the “lets wait for the prices to drop a little lower” trap
Whether you stick to DV, Flash, film — if you have low lighting you’ll end up with a not so well lit picture. The best solution is to simply light the room. The second best solution is to have a camera that has much better low light sensitivity.
In terms of render time and charging your clients — the currency you trade in is VALUE. If money is that element of value that is being exchanged, then calculate into the fee what you believe is fair. Don’t ever make yourself or your time into a commodity. It’s not. The rates for value based proposition are much higher than that of “compensation for time”.
AlBaraa Says: 07.10.08 at 4:10 pm
oh and my current machine specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2 Ghz) on Asus K8V Mobo
3 GB Ram
Ati Radeon 9000 video card
Sound Blaster Xifi sound card
Plenty of hard drive space — although sometimes it doesn’t seem enough
rizAK Says: 08.10.08 at 7:00 am
MashaAllah, thanks for the quick responses!
That’s a nice setup, Dual Core?
My setup: AMD 3800+ x2, 3 GB RAM
Cheap video card which bites off a chunk of 256mb, and onboard sound.
Have you heard of boosting your pcs speed with a flash drive? Kind of like Vistas Readyboost, for XP there’s a program called “eBoostr” check it out.
Newegg has some cheap ram (4 gb for about $50 I think!) if you ever consider upgrading.
rizAK Says: 08.10.08 at 10:16 am
Check this out: http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-video-card-for-your-money-october-2008/
AlBaraa Says: 08.10.08 at 1:24 pm
My current system is only a single core. My laptop is a Dual Core Pentium (which processes video almost twice as fast as my desktop).