I just Hope Everyone out there Accepts That This is A PRO COLORIST and the others who claim them selves one and to take Peoples Money Are Not!!! Thanks Cull always learning from you thanks for your continuous contribution to all of us on this Platform!!!!!!
I'm also a professional photographer and an intermediate colorist, I've watched a ton of people who claims that they're pro colorists, i unsubscribed them all.. Now I'm only stuck with Cull, you're the best on this platform thank you for every second of your time 🙆♂️🙆♂️🙏🙏
Instead of pulling the last key on the grain - under the "Advanced" section on the film grain OFX - are sliders for shadow, midtones and highlights. My go to would have been to adjust those over pulling another key. Grain is definitely a big help for noise, but people need to be careful setting that up and then when uploading to youTube the compression will kick in and that NR and grain will be destroyed by youTube and look like a plastic mush. I also render out 10 seconds of footage on bad noise problems and upload it and then evaluate the results. It is worth the time it takes to know where and how much it will change.
I'm fortunate to find a person who knows what he is talking about and is generous with spreading knowledge about color grading. Greetings my dear friend from Kuwait!
The qualifier suggestion is a really good one. In the same vein and depending on the project, I'll often disconnect the luma from the chroma and only engage chroma. I find that chroma noise tends to be the most garish, but luma noise can often just feel like grain. That way I don't lose much of the underlying texture of the image, but I'm not distracted by a lot of dancing chroma noise. For non-commercial projects, it's a winner.
@@CullenKelly Yeah, I've always used the Enhanced mode; I've never had much of an issue with it. But I still haven't dove that deep into the NR engine in Resolve, so I'm looking forward to this week's livestream.
I get it, but the comedy in a multistep process to reduce noise ending in adding some in again is great. Thanks for the amazing tutorials, absolute masterclass in every video!
I don't use Resolve de-noise anymore. Had to many problems with it I just do a group node with Neat video and grain on top works every time but it does take a hard toll on the system so I only leave it on for final render. With neat video you can ask the dp to shoot a gray background so you can extract the fixed pattern noise for that specific iso and camera. Obviously only for large projects.
So what you’re saying in this tutorial is to stop applying noise reduction at the timeline level and hope it cleans up everything I want it to clean up. Ok. Got it. 👍🏾 sometimes I marvel at my own stupidity but hey, we all start off doing stupid things until we learn how to stop doing stupid things. This Chanel is helping me to not do stupid things any longer.
One thing I liked about the "Faster" noise reduction is that you can decouple the luma and chroma noise reduction and only apply chroma noise reduction if that's what you want. For many clips, I just want a little chroma NR and the Faster preset works pretty well for that.
@@CullenKelly I haven't tried it but presumably you could apply the Better noise reduction on a layer node with the Color composite mode and kinda separate them that way. Wonder if that would give meaningful results
Another very instructional video. Combining NR with the qualifier is a great idea. About temporal NR, the best results I have had, is just using 2 frames and slowly rising the threshold while watching the Parade. Like that you can work in the small range, where the NR kicks in. Also with 1 - 2 frames and not overdoing the threshold, motion still will look natural (at least in my perception …).
I also use this method. I set NR to temporal/best/20/20 and have no noticeable artifacts. Really high settings can cause weird image warping artifacts but just a little bit of temporal goes a long way to getting rid of the very ugliest part of noise.
Cullen - the clarity of explanation, and your eminent competence with the tools inside Resolve just make your content so great to learn from. It's just a mild shame that the 1080p maximum viewing resolution combined with RUclips compression mean it was pretty difficult to really see some of the more nuanced parameter adjustments here. Regardless, your points were made loud and clear - you have a new subscriber!
Amazing, as usual! I'm a noob to DVR, but a disciple of pixel-based masks in Photoshop (generated by H, S or L values), so I'm excited about these HSL-based "qualifier mattes" -- if that's what we must call them! -- over here in video land. I found your channel via some early videos bridging color grading and photography. I'm a Nikon fan girl, so now that my Z9 *finally* shoots raw video I can dive into motion without crushing disappointment in IQ and grade-ability. Surely I'm not alone. My biggest gripe/challenge is that while I'm well-experienced milking goodness out of raw pixels, the language and interface of DVR feels like another planet! Something to the tune of a "A Photographer's Guide to DaVinci Resolve" would be invaluable. Just start marching down the tabs in Lightroom, jumping over to dig out the analgous tools in DVR. Betcha this would garner lots more subs.
Thank you so much for this Cullen I’m working on a project where I have to do basically what you were doing in your example. Your channel has helped me grow so much as a colorist.
Try separate color channels and reduce different amounts of noise on different channels with luma qualification as well. Sometimes it also helps a lot to upscale footage with AI and then remove noise on 2x image with downscaling it afterwards. Cheers!
It’s 12.30am I have a delivery tomorrow to a cinema and my colourist sent me one of the noises files I have ever seen. I’m not sure if it’s because he was tight on time or if he just seriously messed up but finding this video was a god send. Thank you so much . What would be cool when you do things like short cuts is tell us what button you use. I know you have a controller but for complete novice like me it would help. If you ever come to London I will buy you drink and bloody dinner.
Interesting side note to your comment ‘viewers are conditioned to noise’ I agree with this for *our generation* in a film environment. As your interview with Jill showed, kids are growing up with very colorful, pristine, clean, animated movies and may find our subjective preferences to be totally prehistoric. Time will tell in the Cullen household ;) Great video.
Hey Cullen, again, I could learn a lot. Was doing it wrong for quite a while, i.e. going after the temp noise rather than the spatial. Also the trick with adding grain is a powerhorse! Thanks so much for sharing!
My WorkFlow - Apply Noise Reduction on First Node - Use Temporal threshold from 3 -7 - Use Spacial Threshold from 6 -15 - Apply Film Grain on 2nd Node ( i prefer 35mm 4D with a strength of .65) - Apply Sharpening to .47 on the 3rd Node BOOM , Clean image now Grade . . Note - I do this workflow on my a7iii and a6400 bothe 8bit and 10bit footage work with this
thank you for sharing the artificial grain trick, never thought about it but it makes total sense and the result looks much much more better than just a plastic look after hard NR
Great tutorial. What about accessing individual RGB channels to remove noise? I understand the blue channel has the most noise. Adding contrast does help camouflage noise in dark areas.
I am new to resolve I’d be interested in learning how to track things like noise reduction or say making reflections in water where your panning round with a drone, nice informative video thank you
Love your way of explaining things, thanks for this! I really need to know what exactly I'm doing otherwise it feels a bit like I'm just copying something that works on someone else's image, which is what happens after most videos on YT.
Great insights Cullen. Having used Davinci’s noise reduction as well as Neat Video’s and Revision’s Denoise, it’s always great to have the bag of tricks for these processes that are not only sometimes needed, but can have varying effects on caching and playback before getting them to optimum results. Have you ever worked with NR within a splitter combiner node? Neat Video allows you to see the RGB channels and luminance when making Reduction decisions, and considering the luminance qualifier that was showcased, it could be a boon if you know there’s more chrominance noise than noise in the Y channel. Could potentially allow for more nuance in the setup, if allowed time in the grade to produce the longer node system, of course.
Truly learn something new from this, sometimes I just wanna get rid of the chroma noise and your comment puts me in a new perspective. Definitely will try this one out.
Resolve's Spatial NR also natively has this functionality without needing an extra node - just click the chain icon in the Spatial Threshold section to unlink the Luma/Chroma channels, and you can apply NR to them separately
@@GuitaristDavid9 that's true! It's more if you see a leaning in the red vs blue chrominance for adjusting. Certain cameras tend to have more noise in one channel than the other, so having the ability to affect one over the other is always nice to have in the toolkit
Very interesting techniques ! I was a bit sceptical about using a luma qualifier on NR instead of applying the effect to the whole image but that's probably because I never had to push NR that hard ^^
I've seen some recent DP's masterfully adjust their settings on an Arri to simulate grain with noise and a proper set of vintage lenses. Not entirely sure how they do it because unfortunately they couldn't make it to the grading session. But it's truly a wonder to behold when it doesn't need a layer of grain in the session or more than 2% NR
There are a bunch of options with the new arri cam. It can be masterfully done. I'm not sure about models before the alexa LF though. It can look great.
@@devincorboy8638 that makes sense. I had heard about a few texture options on the newest arri's. the episode where I noticed it was with the DP Adam Newport-Berra. he did amazing work with the Arri footage I was handed. truly amazing what happens when you crank the contrast and all this beautiful texture pops up
“Atlanta” DP Christian Sprenger talks a few places about underexposing the Amira as far as 4 stops and pushing it back up to create what he called “filmic” qualities in the shadows… watching the show there’s definitely something going on there, but it’s hard to tell how much noise they left in, reduced, or added back in using some kind of grain emulation. Not sure I’d ever push a sensor that far but it’s cool to see people really experimenting with the digital medium like they did with film. Could be early signs of digital coming into a certain maturity, when people feel comfortable (or bored) enough with the medium that they push it so far
I haven't tried the qualifier tool for my NR but I have used that NR + Film Grain trick to naturalize the image again. Unfortunately I get sent 8-bit underexposed footage more than I'd like so this video will come in handy.
Hi Cullen. In one of the last lessons you explained how the parallel mixer works giving the example, that if we add some value on each node, we have a summary, for instance saturation 51 on both results 52. How does it correspond to noise reduction? Is it some kind of a blend, when you apply noise redution in such a node tree? Btw., before that episode I'd give noise reduction as a first node and then feed parallel nodes like yours...
Many times with 422 footage the blue channel gets really bad with noise and artifacts. I find it great to use Spatial denoise (Best) at around 30~60 only in the Blue channel when there is a lot of color noise. Or when we need to use the qualifier more agressively with Hue and Saturation. Also, the most optimized way of applying temporal noise reduction is using the Difference highlight mode and dial the lowest Thresholds for Luma/Chroma and Motion. Also, ungang the Luma from the Chroma and let the Chroma go higher. Using all those techniques allowed me to recover successfully very bad footage.
@@CullenKelly Hi!! recently i noticed that if i use the ofx NR instead of motion effects i can decouple the chroma and luma in ''Better'' mode, sorry for my bad english and thanks for the amazing videos!!
@@CullenKelly Hey man. I've been using DaVinci for a while now and I'm used to the concepts of Nodes. I didn't get what is the benefits on having NR on a parallel branch. My take was always to have NR at the beginning of my nodetree, so the next nodes can work with a cleanest image. Thanks, man
I've noticed that a lot of people play with color and apply filters where necessary and not necessary.If you're doing commercials or beautiful videos it's understandable. Movies. But when you explain how you use the program and show the interface of the program, you have to make sure that everything, even the little numbers, are visible to the customer or subscriber. If I didn't know what he was doing there, I wouldn't know what those circles were. I am a meter and a half away from my monitor. Just for fun, I turned on my DaVinci - everything is perfectly visible.
@@CullenKelly I am in no way criticizing you, it's up to you how you want to do it. I expressed my opinion on the fact that the interface (program desktop) is too dark.When you sit down at the beginning and start explaining everything is cinematic and that's fine. But the desktop is dark and so you can't see the details of the program well. Maybe you have a 4K monitor and you can see everything well there, I don't know. Maybe my English is not very good. I wish you luck and success. Do as you see fit
RUclips uses another codec for 4K, which preserves noise and grain. I wish they would use it also for 1080p, because many just will upload HD upscaled to UHD to get a decent quality, which is a waste of bandwidth and time. At the viewer end, 4K has to be selected as well, otherwise there is a quality drop again. An additional way to maximize the quality for RUclips ist uploading in ProRes 422 LT.
@@serge_stauffer But won't RUclips try and compress it even more since the file size is huge? Isn't that how RUclips compression works? I could be wrong
@@akshaysaiju4615 Even if YT compresses ProRes LT more, you have a better starting point. Uploading h.264 means that you have already thrown away maybe 95% of the data before YT converts it. To convert an already highly compressed video does not mean that there is less quality loss, it is the opposite. But h.264 can be good enough, if you don’t have to tweak everything to preserve grain or digital noise.
Brilliant, I Have been looking for this and you heard me. I was using this tool wrongly, whenever I used temporal NR on handheld footages recorded at lower shutter speed (180deg shutter angle ) and higher motion blur, temporal noise reduction just ruining the shots. some kind of annoying wobbling effect I used to get after applying NR. I will try your method. Thank you brother. Love and respect for your videos
@@ukhin dead serious. Some people hate noise reduction, some love it. Often hard to get 2 colourists to agree. Also, I’ve had weird smeary artefacts with temporal nr, that went away with spacial. However my Mac nearly melted. Heatwave here in the Uk.
I vaguely remember you being a fan of placing NR near the end of a node tree, and yet in this video you have it on a parallel path. I'm curious if you've intentionally changed your process for some reason. I'm kinda liking the parallel idea, but it seems more like the beginning mindset than the end mindset.
Great video overall one samll thing. RUclipss compression is horrible at only 1080p so for these tutorials where the subject is very subtle it would be amazing if you upscaled your footage to 4k and then uploaded to give the video less compression!
Your opening statement about lowering expectations gave me food for thought. Does this suggest that I don’t have to add noise reduction to every single clip of my RUclips masterpieces, even when shot in good daylight and exposed as best I could?
@@CullenKelly That's great. There really isn't much on RUclips about how, when or where to use NR or indeed how best to use the tool for a hobbyist like me, rather than a pro colourist such as yourself and your peers. I'm still new to this life with Resolve, and I thought you had to Noise Reduce everything to within a pixel of its life to look good, even if shot in daylight. It was taking me for ever to create my five minute masterpieces. Cheers
@@CullenKelly I'd appreciate you taking a quick look at a RUclips tutorial that I use to try and get the best out of Noise Reduction, and offer your thoughts on its effectiveness for a hobbyist like me. Its called "Noise Reduction in DaVinci Resolve 17 Ripple Training"
Very good content, cullen! I just wonder why would you do NR in a parallel node in stead of doing it on the very first node? What's the benefit of doing it on a parallel node? Thank you .
thanks a very helpful tutorial. regarding the use of the parallel node if there are additional nodes needed for the grade, do those go after the mixer node or does the noise reduction remain mixed at the very end?
What hardware are you using? Graphics cards, number of processors, memory, etc. Noise reduction in Davinci resolve is useless to me, it's too slow with Mac mini m1 16gb.
Really interesting! I'm a 3D artist and I'm looking for a solution on how to denoise my CG render, especialy on animation renders. Do your tips can be applied for CGI? Thanks for sharing with that video!
@@CullenKelly thanks for replying! When you do a render (a CG render) the render software calculate all the light bounces and everythings else. You can either leave the render running for a long time until the noise is barely noticible or for a short time and then the software use an AI denoiser to remove the noise. On a still image it's absolutely fine but with an animation it's different. Because the denoise map is not the same on every frames. Sorry for my english it's not my first language ^^ Hopefuly you'll understand
A few notes to add. Regarding your intro statements. No one wants noise or has been conditioned to like or accept noise. We have been conditioned to accept and like film grain, not blotchy ugly digital noise. Very different things. I want to underlay, very different things. In fact, after noise reduction, adding back some simulated film grain, helps to give an illusion of texture underneath and that is a good thing. But you don’t add digital noise, especially chroma noise. You might get away with some luminescence noise if its film like looking, but not chroma noise. Additionally, when you are uploading to a website like RUclips that will compress the living soul out of everything uploaded anyway, its actually dangerous to leave film grain or noise in the shot, because of the way compression on RUclips works. It treats moving elements in the image very differently than static ones, because of variable bit rate and compression algorithms to save space. So when you have fast-moving scenes on RUclips it will look terribly with blocky compression artifacts, and static scenes or with little movement will look pretty good. When you have some noise or even film grain, it will create these pixelated blocky compression artifacts from it. Hence it’s better on RUclips to have overly smooth image than little noise or grain, because compression on RUclips will make it a lot worse than it really is. If you are not outputting to streaming services like social media sites but perhaps Vimeo that is more aimed at videography, it will be less of a problem. Of course proper BlueRay or Theater releases are completely different beast. Usually one need to account for a variety of outputs and their limitations. Just as slightly out of focus shot won’t matter much on RUclips when seen on a smartphone, it will be clearly a problem on a big screen. Just things to keep in mind and stay up to date with changes.
@@CullenKelly Well, noise is not just noise. Film grain is different than digital noise produce by most cameras. Film grain from one film stock is different than from another film stock. If you ever try to accurately simulate film grain from different film stocks or if you ever worked on algorithms for removing film grain you would know that noise from one camera or film grain from one stock is not the same as from another. There is a reason why some film grain is finer in some stocks than others, it used to be a reason why companies release different film stock, to control the size and behaviour of grain. Grain behaves differently with different colors and in different tonal ranges. Digital noise also tends to behave differently in different channels, hence different channels can be used for different approaches to noise reduction and also some scenes can appear nosier than others under same settings for the camera. There is much more to this than simple noise is noise. That is like trying to teach proper fitness practices and claiming a calorie is just a calorie. Not true, the difference exists and its important difference. In regards to noise reduction that is aggressive and leave smoothed skin for example vs leaving digital noise. You have a case there, although not a strong one unless you consider context. Like I said, adding noise even simulated film grain can be detrimental for compressed videos on you-tube, but beneficial for distribution where compression won't turn film grain or digital noise into ugly compression artifices or mushed details just by compression. This is easy to prove. Hence considering the level of compression and method of compression of video is critical when dealing with any fast moving elements in a frame. Just like when dealing with audio for example. You need to play back the audio and mix and master it on surround top of the line monitors or great headphones as well as consumer devices, because you never know when someone will be watching your videos on 480p resolution in compressed form on a smartphone on shaky and noisy subway with one earphone and one handed smartphone us in vertical format. lol My point is that these aspects of the viewing experience must come into consideration when dealing with audio or video as well as if you are distributing it onto a movie screen or blue-ray. You must know this. I'm sure clients require multiple distributions. Or even if you are working with VFX department that may want to do compositing on a clean plate with no noise and add simulated grain later on top of composited CGI elements. All these things are a consideration. Noise is not just noise and there are other factors to consider. Cheers!
@@CullenKelly it is slow and indeed a bit cumbersome, but for me it is much less blotchy and the profiling gives less plasticy results. But there are some problems that need sorting in dr17 for sure.
@@CullenKelly I think if put at the head of the node tree that it is not as destructive if you set it up after doing all the grading, so you can see it in context. I have always done NR after grading but still had it on the first node.
I sometimes hit hard on the spacial noise reduction and deal it down on the key gain, but I am wondering if that is actually a propper way to reduce the amount of it specially when it comes from a plug in such as neat video, since it seems to be taking noise by profiling the amount of "blur" it needs... just wondering because I had a crazy project in which combining both plugin and DaVinci nr it was going crazy. But I aaaaalways use a bit of overlay grain via alpha to harden contrast appearance afterwards. Also, do you work on NR parallel to your base grade? Never clean the signal and then correct it?
Hey Cullen! Love Your stuff :) Question if you dont mind. Is there a way to get my offset wheel to behave the same way in Davinci color managed as in Davinci yrgb ? I realized that the offset wheel does not effect it uniformly in the color managed work flow. Thank you :)
Can anyone please help, anytime I add a noise reducer, it severely affects my play back speed,where am getting like 2 or 3 fames maybe four a second..is this normal?
@@CullenKelly ok great someone on another vid said I should set my project timeline resolution tp 1080p then when I wamt to export it change back to 4k,which helped thanks.
Digital video noise typically affects shadows whereas analog film grain affects mid tones and highlights. This is the keys difference that we subconsciously are adapt to. Davinci’s film grain is too digital looking. A natural analog film grain has subtle nuances such as their random shape and color variance, its probably better to find real film grain scans and then apply it. Only thing is you want to also grade your film grain with your picture. So layering on top of your footage is a bit of a disadvantage unless you want to create compound clips and then grade.
Really interesting techniques and I am going to test these! My only worry would be with darker scenes where we can’t separate the highlights from the lower mid tones and shadows. Would a broader option be better? Say only attacking the chroma? I like to work at group levels and have my NR at the beginning of my node tree. When working in DWG at a group level would you place the NR before the IDT or directly after it? Placement of the node seems to be a topic of conversation (just like grain) Thanks mate
@@CullenKelly I agree, only reason I have heard of is to help pull a cleaner qualifier, however there is a better option for that anyways. As usual I’ll follow along with you until someone gives a valid reason as to put it at the beginning. Cheers mate
I just Hope Everyone out there Accepts That This is A PRO COLORIST and the others who claim them selves one and to take Peoples Money Are Not!!! Thanks Cull always learning from you thanks for your continuous contribution to all of us on this Platform!!!!!!
I like the video first then watch it, because I know I’m going to learn in way that will help me become better at grading.
I'm also a professional photographer and an intermediate colorist, I've watched a ton of people who claims that they're pro colorists, i unsubscribed them all..
Now I'm only stuck with Cull, you're the best on this platform thank you for every second of your time 🙆♂️🙆♂️🙏🙏
Instead of pulling the last key on the grain - under the "Advanced" section on the film grain OFX - are sliders for shadow, midtones and highlights. My go to would have been to adjust those over pulling another key. Grain is definitely a big help for noise, but people need to be careful setting that up and then when uploading to youTube the compression will kick in and that NR and grain will be destroyed by youTube and look like a plastic mush.
I also render out 10 seconds of footage on bad noise problems and upload it and then evaluate the results. It is worth the time it takes to know where and how much it will change.
Thank you Jim!
Yes, an interesting point! It really does matter what the destination of the footage will be...
I'm fortunate to find a person who knows what he is talking about and is generous with spreading knowledge about color grading. Greetings my dear friend from Kuwait!
You are not only a top colourist, but also didactically gifted.
The qualifier suggestion is a really good one.
In the same vein and depending on the project, I'll often disconnect the luma from the chroma and only engage chroma. I find that chroma noise tends to be the most garish, but luma noise can often just feel like grain. That way I don't lose much of the underlying texture of the image, but I'm not distracted by a lot of dancing chroma noise. For non-commercial projects, it's a winner.
Do you do this in both the temporal and spatial regions or are you only using the spatial method?
@@cfazio Most of the time I'm only doing it in spatial. Occasionally temporal. I've yet to use both at the same time.
@@CullenKelly Yeah, I've always used the Enhanced mode; I've never had much of an issue with it. But I still haven't dove that deep into the NR engine in Resolve, so I'm looking forward to this week's livestream.
I get it, but the comedy in a multistep process to reduce noise ending in adding some in again is great. Thanks for the amazing tutorials, absolute masterclass in every video!
The qualifier with usign spatial threshold in the darks is some black magic, absolutely incredible advice!
I don't use Resolve de-noise anymore. Had to many problems with it I just do a group node with Neat video and grain on top works every time but it does take a hard toll on the system so I only leave it on for final render. With neat video you can ask the dp to shoot a gray background so you can extract the fixed pattern noise for that specific iso and camera. Obviously only for large projects.
This is by far one of my favorite channels on YT! Thanks for all the color grading knowledge you share!
So what you’re saying in this tutorial is to stop applying noise reduction at the timeline level and hope it cleans up everything I want it to clean up. Ok. Got it. 👍🏾 sometimes I marvel at my own stupidity but hey, we all start off doing stupid things until we learn how to stop doing stupid things. This Chanel is helping me to not do stupid things any longer.
Thanks and I can't imagine more clearly explained workflows than the videos you consistently share with us. Fantastic and much appreciated Sir Cullen!
One thing I liked about the "Faster" noise reduction is that you can decouple the luma and chroma noise reduction and only apply chroma noise reduction if that's what you want. For many clips, I just want a little chroma NR and the Faster preset works pretty well for that.
@@CullenKelly I haven't tried it but presumably you could apply the Better noise reduction on a layer node with the Color composite mode and kinda separate them that way. Wonder if that would give meaningful results
Came here to type the same thing! Remove chroma noise first, and then manipulate luma noise if needed.
Amazing tutorial. Never thought off using qualifier with noise reduction. Thank you!
Another very instructional video. Combining NR with the qualifier is a great idea. About temporal NR, the best results I have had, is just using 2 frames and slowly rising the threshold while watching the Parade. Like that you can work in the small range, where the NR kicks in. Also with 1 - 2 frames and not overdoing the threshold, motion still will look natural (at least in my perception …).
I also use this method. I set NR to temporal/best/20/20 and have no noticeable artifacts. Really high settings can cause weird image warping artifacts but just a little bit of temporal goes a long way to getting rid of the very ugliest part of noise.
As a newbie, my mind is blown by this technique - thank you for sharing your skills!
this blew my mind both from a practical standpoint and from a philosophical perspective.
Cullen - the clarity of explanation, and your eminent competence with the tools inside Resolve just make your content so great to learn from. It's just a mild shame that the 1080p maximum viewing resolution combined with RUclips compression mean it was pretty difficult to really see some of the more nuanced parameter adjustments here. Regardless, your points were made loud and clear - you have a new subscriber!
Amazing, as usual!
I'm a noob to DVR, but a disciple of pixel-based masks in Photoshop (generated by H, S or L values), so I'm excited about these HSL-based "qualifier mattes" -- if that's what we must call them! -- over here in video land.
I found your channel via some early videos bridging color grading and photography. I'm a Nikon fan girl, so now that my Z9 *finally* shoots raw video I can dive into motion without crushing disappointment in IQ and grade-ability. Surely I'm not alone.
My biggest gripe/challenge is that while I'm well-experienced milking goodness out of raw pixels, the language and interface of DVR feels like another planet!
Something to the tune of a "A Photographer's Guide to DaVinci Resolve" would be invaluable. Just start marching down the tabs in Lightroom, jumping over to dig out the analgous tools in DVR. Betcha this would garner lots more subs.
This is the best noise reduction tutorial I've seen. And it makes sense bc you're a professional. Many thanks.
Thank you so much for this Cullen I’m working on a project where I have to do basically what you were doing in your example. Your channel has helped me grow so much as a colorist.
Try separate color channels and reduce different amounts of noise on different channels with luma qualification as well. Sometimes it also helps a lot to upscale footage with AI and then remove noise on 2x image with downscaling it afterwards. Cheers!
It’s 12.30am I have a delivery tomorrow to a cinema and my colourist sent me one of the noises files I have ever seen.
I’m not sure if it’s because he was tight on time or if he just seriously messed up but finding this video was a god send.
Thank you so much .
What would be cool when you do things like short cuts is tell us what button you use. I know you have a controller but for complete novice like me it would help.
If you ever come to London I will buy you drink and bloody dinner.
Perfect timing for me as I am delving deeper into Resolve and this was on my list. Thank you.
How do you go in to your “Highlight mode” for selecting just your darker zones?
Interesting side note to your comment ‘viewers are conditioned to noise’ I agree with this for *our generation* in a film environment. As your interview with Jill showed, kids are growing up with very colorful, pristine, clean, animated movies and may find our subjective preferences to be totally prehistoric. Time will tell in the Cullen household ;)
Great video.
I'm sitting here in disbelief on how helpful this video was...thank you Cullen
Qualifying Noise Reduction! Another great approach! You're batting a thousand Cullen!
Cullen, am so happy that I found your channel. Thank you for sharing! ✨
Hey Cullen, again, I could learn a lot. Was doing it wrong for quite a while, i.e. going after the temp noise rather than the spatial.
Also the trick with adding grain is a powerhorse! Thanks so much for sharing!
My WorkFlow
- Apply Noise Reduction on First Node
- Use Temporal threshold from 3 -7
- Use Spacial Threshold from 6 -15
- Apply Film Grain on 2nd Node ( i prefer 35mm 4D with a strength of .65)
- Apply Sharpening to .47 on the 3rd Node
BOOM , Clean image now Grade
.
.
Note - I do this workflow on my a7iii and a6400 bothe 8bit and 10bit footage work with this
@@CullenKelly That's interesting as I was taught to put it at the head too. Why do you do it differently? I'm very keen to improve our NR!
thank you for sharing the artificial grain trick, never thought about it but it makes total sense and the result looks much much more better than just a plastic look after hard NR
appreciate this NR strategy Cullen!
Great tutorial. What about accessing individual RGB channels to remove noise? I understand the blue channel has the most noise. Adding contrast does help camouflage noise in dark areas.
I am new to resolve I’d be interested in learning how to track things like noise reduction or say making reflections in water where your panning round with a drone, nice informative video thank you
Whenever I did excessive noise reduction my image always looked plastic and fake? This video is really helping me learn how to better use Resolve.
Love your way of explaining things, thanks for this! I really need to know what exactly I'm doing otherwise it feels a bit like I'm just copying something that works on someone else's image, which is what happens after most videos on YT.
Great insights Cullen. Having used Davinci’s noise reduction as well as Neat Video’s and Revision’s Denoise, it’s always great to have the bag of tricks for these processes that are not only sometimes needed, but can have varying effects on caching and playback before getting them to optimum results.
Have you ever worked with NR within a splitter combiner node? Neat Video allows you to see the RGB channels and luminance when making Reduction decisions, and considering the luminance qualifier that was showcased, it could be a boon if you know there’s more chrominance noise than noise in the Y channel. Could potentially allow for more nuance in the setup, if allowed time in the grade to produce the longer node system, of course.
Truly learn something new from this, sometimes I just wanna get rid of the chroma noise and your comment puts me in a new perspective. Definitely will try this one out.
Resolve's Spatial NR also natively has this functionality without needing an extra node - just click the chain icon in the Spatial Threshold section to unlink the Luma/Chroma channels, and you can apply NR to them separately
@@GuitaristDavid9 that's true! It's more if you see a leaning in the red vs blue chrominance for adjusting. Certain cameras tend to have more noise in one channel than the other, so having the ability to affect one over the other is always nice to have in the toolkit
Very interesting techniques ! I was a bit sceptical about using a luma qualifier on NR instead of applying the effect to the whole image but that's probably because I never had to push NR that hard ^^
I've seen some recent DP's masterfully adjust their settings on an Arri to simulate grain with noise and a proper set of vintage lenses. Not entirely sure how they do it because unfortunately they couldn't make it to the grading session. But it's truly a wonder to behold when it doesn't need a layer of grain in the session or more than 2% NR
There are a bunch of options with the new arri cam. It can be masterfully done. I'm not sure about models before the alexa LF though. It can look great.
@@devincorboy8638 that makes sense. I had heard about a few texture options on the newest arri's. the episode where I noticed it was with the DP Adam Newport-Berra. he did amazing work with the Arri footage I was handed. truly amazing what happens when you crank the contrast and all this beautiful texture pops up
“Atlanta” DP Christian Sprenger talks a few places about underexposing the Amira as far as 4 stops and pushing it back up to create what he called “filmic” qualities in the shadows… watching the show there’s definitely something going on there, but it’s hard to tell how much noise they left in, reduced, or added back in using some kind of grain emulation.
Not sure I’d ever push a sensor that far but it’s cool to see people really experimenting with the digital medium like they did with film. Could be early signs of digital coming into a certain maturity, when people feel comfortable (or bored) enough with the medium that they push it so far
your videos have been bangers lately keep it up. I would like a video about film grain itself and noise patterns
Hi Cullen and thank you I love the idea to move the grade school this direction Thanks all the best from London
I haven't tried the qualifier tool for my NR but I have used that NR + Film Grain trick to naturalize the image again. Unfortunately I get sent 8-bit underexposed footage more than I'd like so this video will come in handy.
Hi Cullen. In one of the last lessons you explained how the parallel mixer works giving the example, that if we add some value on each node, we have a summary, for instance saturation 51 on both results 52. How does it correspond to noise reduction? Is it some kind of a blend, when you apply noise redution in such a node tree? Btw., before that episode I'd give noise reduction as a first node and then feed parallel nodes like yours...
@@CullenKelly OK, thank you!
This tutorial was superb!
Many times with 422 footage the blue channel gets really bad with noise and artifacts. I find it great to use Spatial denoise (Best) at around 30~60 only in the Blue channel when there is a lot of color noise. Or when we need to use the qualifier more agressively with Hue and Saturation. Also, the most optimized way of applying temporal noise reduction is using the Difference highlight mode and dial the lowest Thresholds for Luma/Chroma and Motion. Also, ungang the Luma from the Chroma and let the Chroma go higher. Using all those techniques allowed me to recover successfully very bad footage.
@@CullenKelly Hi!! recently i noticed that if i use the ofx NR instead of motion effects i can decouple the chroma and luma in ''Better'' mode, sorry for my bad english and thanks for the amazing videos!!
Oh yes plz, more color grading. I would like to do Photoshop stuff in DaVinci. I gotta go check out the basic videos first!
Love it! This really helped with my shots! So, thank u so much!
Hey man. I didn’t get why you used NR in a parallel node. Thanks so much for what you’ ve been putting out.
@@CullenKelly Hey man. I've been using DaVinci for a while now and I'm used to the concepts of Nodes. I didn't get what is the benefits on having NR on a parallel branch. My take was always to have NR at the beginning of my nodetree, so the next nodes can work with a cleanest image. Thanks, man
I've noticed that a lot of people play with color and apply filters where necessary and not necessary.If you're doing commercials or beautiful videos it's understandable. Movies. But when you explain how you use the program and show the interface of the program, you have to make sure that everything, even the little numbers, are visible to the customer or subscriber. If I didn't know what he was doing there, I wouldn't know what those circles were. I am a meter and a half away from my monitor. Just for fun, I turned on my DaVinci - everything is perfectly visible.
@@CullenKelly I am in no way criticizing you, it's up to you how you want to do it. I expressed my opinion on the fact that the interface (program desktop) is too dark.When you sit down at the beginning and start explaining everything is cinematic and that's fine. But the desktop is dark and so you can't see the details of the program well. Maybe you have a 4K monitor and you can see everything well there, I don't know.
Maybe my English is not very good.
I wish you luck and success. Do as you see fit
So great! noise reduction + qualifier. Thanks
I really appreciate this video, this is super informative. Although, a 4k upload would've helped me see what was happening better.
RUclips uses another codec for 4K, which preserves noise and grain. I wish they would use it also for 1080p, because many just will upload HD upscaled to UHD to get a decent quality, which is a waste of bandwidth and time. At the viewer end, 4K has to be selected as well, otherwise there is a quality drop again. An additional way to maximize the quality for RUclips ist uploading in ProRes 422 LT.
@@serge_stauffer I didn't know uploading in Prores could maintain better quality when uploaded to RUclips
@@akshaysaiju4615 It is one H.264 conversion less, but the files are huge, so maybe not for longer videos …
@@serge_stauffer But won't RUclips try and compress it even more since the file size is huge? Isn't that how RUclips compression works? I could be wrong
@@akshaysaiju4615 Even if YT compresses ProRes LT more, you have a better starting point. Uploading h.264 means that you have already thrown away maybe 95% of the data before YT converts it. To convert an already highly compressed video does not mean that there is less quality loss, it is the opposite. But h.264 can be good enough, if you don’t have to tweak everything to preserve grain or digital noise.
Brilliant, I Have been looking for this and you heard me. I was using this tool wrongly, whenever I used temporal NR on handheld footages recorded at lower shutter speed (180deg shutter angle ) and higher motion blur, temporal noise reduction just ruining the shots. some kind of annoying wobbling effect I used to get after applying NR. I will try your method. Thank you brother. Love and respect for your videos
A really useful discussion of a thorny issue! From now on, I’ll tell my clients to lower their expectations..
🤔Can't tell if being sarcastic...
@@ukhin dead serious. Some people hate noise reduction, some love it. Often hard to get 2 colourists to agree.
Also, I’ve had weird smeary artefacts with temporal nr, that went away with spacial. However my Mac nearly melted. Heatwave here in the Uk.
This is great knowledge 👍🏻, infinite thanks Cullen
I vaguely remember you being a fan of placing NR near the end of a node tree, and yet in this video you have it on a parallel path. I'm curious if you've intentionally changed your process for some reason. I'm kinda liking the parallel idea, but it seems more like the beginning mindset than the end mindset.
Great video overall one samll thing. RUclipss compression is horrible at only 1080p so for these tutorials where the subject is very subtle it would be amazing if you upscaled your footage to 4k and then uploaded to give the video less compression!
Cullen, txs so much for the info. Cheers!
Your opening statement about lowering expectations gave me food for thought.
Does this suggest that I don’t have to add noise reduction to every single clip of my RUclips masterpieces, even when shot in good daylight and exposed as best I could?
@@CullenKelly That's great.
There really isn't much on RUclips about how, when or where to use NR or indeed how best to use the tool for a hobbyist like me, rather than a pro colourist such as yourself and your peers.
I'm still new to this life with Resolve, and I thought you had to Noise Reduce everything to within a pixel of its life to look good, even if shot in daylight. It was taking me for ever to create my five minute masterpieces.
Cheers
@@CullenKelly I'd appreciate you taking a quick look at a RUclips tutorial that I use to try and get the best out of Noise Reduction, and offer your thoughts on its effectiveness for a hobbyist like me. Its called "Noise Reduction in DaVinci Resolve 17 Ripple Training"
Very good content, cullen! I just wonder why would you do NR in a parallel node in stead of doing it on the very first node? What's the benefit of doing it on a parallel node? Thank you .
@@CullenKelly Thank you cullen, will try it out on some r5c 8k raw footage as soon as I get back to my studio.(they are very noisy)
thanks a very helpful tutorial. regarding the use of the parallel node if there are additional nodes needed for the grade, do those go after the mixer node or does the noise reduction remain mixed at the very end?
@@CullenKelly yes - thanks
Thank you!
Most useful! Thank you
Why not add some temporal NR? Works so well to remove chatter.
There is an advantage to use nr into a parallel node?
What hardware are you using? Graphics cards, number of processors, memory, etc. Noise reduction in Davinci resolve is useless to me, it's too slow with Mac mini m1 16gb.
Really interesting! I'm a 3D artist and I'm looking for a solution on how to denoise my CG render, especialy on animation renders. Do your tips can be applied for CGI? Thanks for sharing with that video!
@@CullenKelly thanks for replying! When you do a render (a CG render) the render software calculate all the light bounces and everythings else. You can either leave the render running for a long time until the noise is barely noticible or for a short time and then the software use an AI denoiser to remove the noise. On a still image it's absolutely fine but with an animation it's different. Because the denoise map is not the same on every frames.
Sorry for my english it's not my first language ^^
Hopefuly you'll understand
A few notes to add.
Regarding your intro statements. No one wants noise or has been conditioned to like or accept noise. We have been conditioned to accept and like film grain, not blotchy ugly digital noise. Very different things. I want to underlay, very different things. In fact, after noise reduction, adding back some simulated film grain, helps to give an illusion of texture underneath and that is a good thing. But you don’t add digital noise, especially chroma noise.
You might get away with some luminescence noise if its film like looking, but not chroma noise. Additionally, when you are uploading to a website like RUclips that will compress the living soul out of everything uploaded anyway, its actually dangerous to leave film grain or noise in the shot, because of the way compression on RUclips works. It treats moving elements in the image very differently than static ones, because of variable bit rate and compression algorithms to save space.
So when you have fast-moving scenes on RUclips it will look terribly with blocky compression artifacts, and static scenes or with little movement will look pretty good. When you have some noise or even film grain, it will create these pixelated blocky compression artifacts from it. Hence it’s better on RUclips to have overly smooth image than little noise or grain, because compression on RUclips will make it a lot worse than it really is. If you are not outputting to streaming services like social media sites but perhaps Vimeo that is more aimed at videography, it will be less of a problem. Of course proper BlueRay or Theater releases are completely different beast.
Usually one need to account for a variety of outputs and their limitations. Just as slightly out of focus shot won’t matter much on RUclips when seen on a smartphone, it will be clearly a problem on a big screen. Just things to keep in mind and stay up to date with changes.
@@CullenKelly Well, noise is not just noise. Film grain is different than digital noise produce by most cameras. Film grain from one film stock is different than from another film stock. If you ever try to accurately simulate film grain from different film stocks or if you ever worked on algorithms for removing film grain you would know that noise from one camera or film grain from one stock is not the same as from another. There is a reason why some film grain is finer in some stocks than others, it used to be a reason why companies release different film stock, to control the size and behaviour of grain.
Grain behaves differently with different colors and in different tonal ranges. Digital noise also tends to behave differently in different channels, hence different channels can be used for different approaches to noise reduction and also some scenes can appear nosier than others under same settings for the camera.
There is much more to this than simple noise is noise. That is like trying to teach proper fitness practices and claiming a calorie is just a calorie. Not true, the difference exists and its important difference.
In regards to noise reduction that is aggressive and leave smoothed skin for example vs leaving digital noise. You have a case there, although not a strong one unless you consider context. Like I said, adding noise even simulated film grain can be detrimental for compressed videos on you-tube, but beneficial for distribution where compression won't turn film grain or digital noise into ugly compression artifices or mushed details just by compression.
This is easy to prove. Hence considering the level of compression and method of compression of video is critical when dealing with any fast moving elements in a frame. Just like when dealing with audio for example. You need to play back the audio and mix and master it on surround top of the line monitors or great headphones as well as consumer devices, because you never know when someone will be watching your videos on 480p resolution in compressed form on a smartphone on shaky and noisy subway with one earphone and one handed smartphone us in vertical format. lol
My point is that these aspects of the viewing experience must come into consideration when dealing with audio or video as well as if you are distributing it onto a movie screen or blue-ray.
You must know this. I'm sure clients require multiple distributions. Or even if you are working with VFX department that may want to do compositing on a clean plate with no noise and add simulated grain later on top of composited CGI elements. All these things are a consideration. Noise is not just noise and there are other factors to consider.
Cheers!
What do you actually think of using neat video for noise reduction? I have a feeling it can be used in a more nuanced way.
@@CullenKelly it is slow and indeed a bit cumbersome, but for me it is much less blotchy and the profiling gives less plasticy results. But there are some problems that need sorting in dr17 for sure.
Why does cullen use a mixer node instead of just putting the noise reduction nodes at the beginning (in front of exposure, ratio, etc.)?
@@CullenKelly I think if put at the head of the node tree that it is not as destructive if you set it up after doing all the grading, so you can see it in context. I have always done NR after grading but still had it on the first node.
I sometimes hit hard on the spacial noise reduction and deal it down on the key gain, but I am wondering if that is actually a propper way to reduce the amount of it specially when it comes from a plug in such as neat video, since it seems to be taking noise by profiling the amount of "blur" it needs... just wondering because I had a crazy project in which combining both plugin and DaVinci nr it was going crazy. But I aaaaalways use a bit of overlay grain via alpha to harden contrast appearance afterwards.
Also, do you work on NR parallel to your base grade? Never clean the signal and then correct it?
Hey Cullen! Love Your stuff :) Question if you dont mind. Is there a way to get my offset wheel to behave the same way in Davinci color managed as in Davinci yrgb ? I realized that the offset wheel does not effect it uniformly in the color managed work flow. Thank you :)
@@CullenKelly Roger that! Appreciate it :) just wanted to make sure that’s what it was indeed suppose to be doing! Look forward to future videos :)
Brilliant!!
The only bad thing about your videos is RUclips's compression in HD, which destroys any details you focus on. Does uploading in 4K helps??
Yes, it does help. RUclips allocates more bitrate for compressing 4K videos.
Can anyone please help, anytime I add a noise reducer, it severely affects my play back speed,where am getting like 2 or 3 fames maybe four a second..is this normal?
@@CullenKelly ok great someone on another vid said I should set my project timeline resolution tp 1080p then when I wamt to export it change back to 4k,which helped thanks.
Digital video noise typically affects shadows whereas analog film grain affects mid tones and highlights. This is the keys difference that we subconsciously are adapt to. Davinci’s film grain is too digital looking. A natural analog film grain has subtle nuances such as their random shape and color variance, its probably better to find real film grain scans and then apply it. Only thing is you want to also grade your film grain with your picture. So layering on top of your footage is a bit of a disadvantage unless you want to create compound clips and then grade.
Neat Video is AMAZING.
Really interesting techniques and I am going to test these! My only worry would be with darker scenes where we can’t separate the highlights from the lower mid tones and shadows. Would a broader option be better? Say only attacking the chroma? I like to work at group levels and have my NR at the beginning of my node tree. When working in DWG at a group level would you place the NR before the IDT or directly after it? Placement of the node seems to be a topic of conversation (just like grain)
Thanks mate
@@CullenKelly I agree, only reason I have heard of is to help pull a cleaner qualifier, however there is a better option for that anyways.
As usual I’ll follow along with you until someone gives a valid reason as to put it at the beginning.
Cheers mate
jealous you can even run the footage with it turned on - i can’t add it without killing my computer lol
Doing this operation without looking the scopes means making video just to make video
Why are your videos with so low brightness ?
@@CullenKelly Got it sir, thank you for taking out the time to reply 😄
Мир
lots and lots of great stuff in here, thanks