Smoothing out roughness/graininess ..?

[dmiraie]

Hi,, noob here,, is there any way to remove some of the roughness/graininess/pixelation etc from a (background) stock animation such as this (ie like any specific plugins/filters/techniques etc)(see still below)? Thnx!

[RobShultz]

Maybe try adding a slight blur to the video. Perhaps a Gaussian Blur effect and adjust the amount of blur to small percentage.

[dmiraie]

Thnx, my goal is to smooth out the rough areas, but also not lose any sharpness.. I guess it would be something of a more 'involved' clean-up.. That's why I was wondering if there was a particular specialized effect or something for such a task..

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

There are some fairly good 3rd party tools that will help you with this problem. The product and the use depend entirely on the footage. Inside AE there is a Remove Grain effect in Effects>Noise & Grain that will do a fairly good job on some footage. I would put the footage in its own comp, trim it to the length you need it to be in your project plus a couple of frames so you can make some adjustments and then render to a suitable visually lossless DI format (digital intermediate) and replace the footage in your project. Why go to that trouble? Because Remove Grain and the 3rd party options, take a very long time to render and if you stack up a bunch of other effects on top of the footage it's pretty easy to run into rendering and performance problems.

[dmiraie]

Thnx, that seems to make quite a difference..

Just to clarify, when I "render and replace" a 'dynamically linked' Premiere clip to "Quicktime - GoPro Cineform RGB12-Bit with Alpha at Maximum Bit-Depth," does that count as "visually lossless"?  Thnx!

[Rick Gerard]

Yep, that’s what I use for a lot of my DI’s.