Noise removal with Topaz Enhance in Premiere CS3

Click the video to start playing, or watch it on YouTube. The original source file is here: noise.avi (39.5 MB)
Right click the link and click "Save As" to download it. For more information check out Topaz Enhance's User's Manual.

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Transcript of video

Hi. In this tutorial we’ll take out some pretty severe noise from a clip taken in low lighting conditions.

We’ll use Topaz Enhance with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 on Windows for this one. You can download the original clip that we’re going to use, called “noise.avi”, on this page. You’ll need Topaz Enhance, available at topazlabs.com, and Premiere Pro CS3, although like always you can follow along with After Effects or Final Cut Pro as well.

Go ahead and open up the clip and check it out. This is a small NTSC DV clip recorded by a low-end miniDV camcorder. Due to low lighting and the quality of the camcorder, we see quite a bit of noise, and the details are obscured and color looks washed out. Let’s stop it and we’ll see it’s also interlaced. Because we always recommend that you deinterlace clips before putting any other Topaz Enhance filters on it, we’ll have to deinterlace first before taking out the noise.

Open up Premiere and create a new project. We’ll be using the DV NTSC preset and then changing the Fields to Progressive, which is an important requirement when working with Topaz Enhance in Premiere. When doing your own video make sure the size and frame rate matches exactly to your footage, and make sure that your project is Progressive even if your footage is interlaced. This is very important, check our User’s Manual to find out why.

Go ahead and name your project whatever you want, I’ll name it noiseproject, and click OK. Import the noise.avi clip by going to File, Import and choosing the clip. Now select it and go to clip, Video Options. Make sure that Frame Blend is off, and in the same menu make sure that Field Options is set to None as well. Now go to the quality button over here and make sure it’s set at Highest Quality. All of this is very important before any sort of processing with Topaz Enhance.

Drag and drop noise.avi into your sequence. To begin, let’s see what happens if we try to brighten up this clip right now. Go to Video Effects, Adjust, Levels, and drag it into your video. Brighten the image up a little bit like this, and we immediately see that the noise is hugely magnified. So we need to remove all this noise.

Because the video is interlaced, we have to first deinterlace the video before removing the noise. Go to Video Effects, Topaz Enhance, Deinterlace, and drag it into your video. Set it to Lower Field first, drag it above the Levels adjustment, and now our video is deinterlaced and ready for noise reduction.

Here, if you’re in After Effects, you’ll need to nest compositions. For more on that refer to the User’s Manual. In Premiere, Fusion, and Final Cut Pro, you don’t need to worry about this. Go to Video Effects, Topaz Enhance, Clean (YC), and drag it into your footage, putting it above Levels but below Deinterlace. The amount of noise is immediately reduced.

You actually could have used any number of Topaz filters designed for noise reduction. Experiment with both the RGB and YC variants of Clean, as well as the filter Denoise and Enhance. The fast single-frame Wavelet filter does a good job of cleaning up excess noise as well. Here with Topaz Clean we’ll set the threshold to 12 which, if we look at the video, eliminates the noise problem. For extra effect we’ll go to the Advanced Settings, lower the Radius to 2, and use 5 frames instead of 3 for best effect.

The noise is far less visible now, even with the levels adjustment. Now we can render the video, export it, and have a much better clip than we started with.

Like most other Topaz filters, the Clean filter uses information from multiple adjacent frames to distinguish between noise and details. This means that, to some degree, the software can detect which parts of the clip is noise to be removed and which are details to be preserved. Noise reduction methods that only take one frame into consideration, no matter how good, will never be able to tell the difference because there’s just not enough information. This is demonstrated perfectly here. On the left, you have a native Premiere noise reduction tool applied to the video – only enough so that the noise is acceptably reduced. On the other hand, you can see that Topaz Enhance will give you a cleaner, clearer, and crisper image without the noise but without blurring the image either.

Thanks for watching! For more video tutorials and other information, please visit our website at topazlabs.com. As always, if you ever have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to contact us at support@topazlabs.com or call us at 972-383-1589.

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