Denoise… what? A lot of filmmakers these days add film grains and noise to their digital footage so you might wonder why we’re writing a tutorial on denoising digital video. Here are some factors to consider:
- Clean footage is exudes a professional aura to your production, especially when working for clients.
- Clean footage is almost always needed for VFX shots and clean plates.
- Denoising software is expensive, with the method in this post you can save on plugins and invest those funds on education to become a better artist!
Denoising your footage can be quite laborious and time consuming, the best thing to do is make sure you don’t need to denoise at all! However, this is not always possible due to hardware limitations.
“I can just pirate After Effects and Neat Video and I’m all set, I don’t need go open source!”
True, you can do that if you’re doing portfolio work. However, if you pirate for professional projects and get caught doing it; you will be liable to pay heavy fines and may lose out on future work. Not to mention its just plain unethical. Now, enough blabbering and onto the tutorial!
The method we’ll show you in this post is completely free wether you’re a beginner or a professional filmmaker or just need to denoise some home videos. We will be using RAWTherapee, to denoise our videos. RAWTherapee is an open-source program which means its free for absolutely anything and runs on Windows and Mac OSX. Let’s begin by downloading the program by clicking HERE.
RAWTherapee is mainly a photo editing program. The way to use RAWTherapee as a video denoising tool is to have your video in a image sequence format. There are plenty of application and methods to do this so we won’t get into in this post. A quick google search will render some useful results.
Using the sidebar, browse to the location of your image sequence folder. Select and double click the folder to load the entire image sequence into the RAWTherapee window.
Select the first frame from the image sequence and double click it to enter into editing mode.
From the right side of the window, head over to the “Details” tab.
Switch on the “Noise Reduction” section by clicking the power icon next to the heading.
Change the method to RGB and quality to high. We used luminance value of 85.00. Every shot is going to require a different setting based on how much present in the shot. These are the settings we used but play around with the settings and see what works for your shots.
Now we need to apply these settings to the rest of the images in the image sequence. To do this click on the icon shown below to copy the current picture profile to clipboard.
We need to apply these settings to the rest of the images in our image sequence. Use the File Browser Tab to head back to the rest of the image sequences.
In the file browser, select all the images in the image sequence by hitting CTRL + A. Then right click on any image and select Processing Profile Operations > Paste.
Right Click again and select Put To Queue.
Head over to the Queue panel from the inspector window on the left.
In the Queue window, select where you want to save your processed image sequence and then hit the Start Processing button to start exporting your denoised image sequence.