8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

questions about practical use of Neat Video, examples of use
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ddessert
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Joined: Fri Oct 28, 2022 12:01 am

8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

Post by ddessert »

I inherited a set of 8mm films from the 1940's and 50's from my father. I've had them digitized to 5.2K 16fps (overscanned) and am trying to use the Final Cut Pro (FCPX) Neat Video plugin to clean them up.

Because these digitized clips are 16 fps, FCPX has to turn this into a standard frame rate. I've chosen 30 fps. The default Frame Sampling is "floor" which just duplicates most of the 16 frames to get 30 fps. Instead I am using FCPX's Optical Flow Frame Sampling to smooth things out between frames and each frame is now unique.

The result of the resampling is that the 30 fps clip now propagates any single-frame artifacts to 1-2 adjacent frames. Neat Video's temporal noise reduction no longer sees these as single-frame artifacts and does not remove them. I thought I could overcome this by increasing the Radius to include more surrounding frames that won't have the artifacts but that didn't help.

The ideal fix would be to process the 16 fps original clip with Neat Video to clean up the noise, dust, scratches, etc and then import the cleaned up clip to FCPX for resampling to 30 fps. Is there a way to do this?

Another alternative idea is to use FCPX's "Floor" frame sampling so that the frames are just repeated and tell Neat Video there are repeated frames. It seems that the effect of this is that the resulting output is not as smooth.
NVTeam
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Re: 8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

Post by NVTeam »

> The ideal fix would be to process the 16 fps original clip with Neat Video to clean up the noise, dust, scratches, etc and then import the cleaned up clip to FCPX for resampling to 30 fps.

Yes, that would be the optimal and most correct solution. As far as I know, FCPX is not able to work with 16 fps projects, unfortunately. I believe Resolve can do that, so you may want to test that using the free version of Resolve and Demo version of Neat Video for Resolve. It may also be possible with Premiere or After Effects, but I am less sure about those two.

Vlad
NVTeam
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Re: 8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

Post by NVTeam »

It may still be possible to achieve that in FCP alone. The idea is the following:

1. Create a new project with say 30 fps frame rate;
2. Add the source 16 fps clip to that project.
3. Do not change the frame rate of the clip.
4. Increase the speed (click the icon 'Choose clip retiming options' and select Custom) of the clip in 30/16 = 1.875 times faster or 187.5% (so it will play faster than normal for now).
5. Apply Neat Video to the clip.
6. Render/export the project as a new 30 fps clip (it will still play faster than normal).
7. Import that 30 fps clip into your editing project and apply the reverse speed change to that clip making it 16/30 = 0.533 times slower or 53.3%, so returning back to normal speed.
8. Further edit the clip as necessary.

Hope this helps,
Vlad
ddessert
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Oct 28, 2022 12:01 am

Re: 8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

Post by ddessert »

I've found an easy solution using ffmpeg free video conversion tool to change the 16 fps video's metadata so it will be considered to be a different frame rate without adding or dropping any frames.

It takes just a moment to execute as none of the frames are added, removed, or altered (just copied) just with new metadata to say it is 30 fps.

Code: Select all

# Changes from 16 fps to 30 fps, adding/removing no frames (16fps / 30fps = 0.5333)
ffmpeg -itsscale 0.5333 -i input_16fps.mp4 -map 0 -c copy output_30fps.mp4
Then I can import the 30 fps version (output_30fps.mp4) into FCPX and process it with Neat Video. Sure, the clip will run at a higher rate of speed, but I can fix that by retiming the clip to play 53.3% of normal speed using Optical Flow Frame Sampling.
NVTeam
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Re: 8mm/16fps Temporal Noise Reduction

Post by NVTeam »

Yes, the general idea is the same as in our scenario above, except using an external tool to edit the metadata. Our scenario achieves the same by using only built-in tools of FCPX, which may be preferable if you cannot use ffmpeg for some reason.
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