JamieG Analysis

In today’s post I want to honour my “too cleaver for his own good” brother. Martin Gardiner.

Recently I had a director and producer come into our office wanting to do a digital-HD screening for cast and crew. (I do encoding for cinema now and then) Somehow the camera was set up wrong and the pictures had terrible grain in them. This is a story how an old After-FX plug in my brother wrote a long time ago, came to save the day.

I cannot name the film in question, but the story goes like this. It was a Sony Cine-Alta camera, from my understanding, one used on Superman. It was running late from a previous shoot and came directly from that shoot. The setting where not set back to defaults. In any case, the resulting data on the tape (HDcam) was extremely poor.

Some of the biggest post production houses in Australia worked on it. Post house’s I have great respect for. Still, they don’t have my brother.

I had long discussions with the director and producer going over every option to help it out. The resulting master was expected considering the master tapes from the shoot. Still, this did remind me of 16mm noise.

This led me to an old de-grain filter my brother wrote many years ago. This filter was designed to improve 16mil film and poor quality standard definition content when been blown up to 35mil film. (My brother and I build a 2k film recorder. It is still in action. In its day we use to push up to 300 commercials a month through it.)

Anyway, this filter is different to most as it uses temporal (time, as in previous and next frames) to help figure out what is noise and what is not. You need to tweak it right, but if you do, it works very well.

I must admit, my brother has written some amazing code.

I have attached a 30mbit very hi-quality H.264 file (about 44meg for 12 seconds) living in the new Flash Player (MovieStar with H.264 support). It is living on my work server/link. So be patient for the download. Once downloaded, go full screen and play it back.

Notice that the 1st of a 4x3sec sequences is a RAIN scene. Notice how much of the rain has been removed. Rain is noise… These sequences where taken from a general noise reduction pass on the full master. (Not scene by scene tweaked. I.e. wouldn’t use it on the rain shots.

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