I need help lightening dark footage while avoiding noise/grain

[aaddiiooss]

Hi. I'm editing a film and one scene was shot in very low light — outdoors during dusk, using only available light (what was left of the setting sun). I'm having a hard time brightening it up without serious noise showing up.

The scene will be in high contrast black and white.

What I've tried so far is to add Lumetri Effects. I reduced saturation to zero for the black and white. I added about 4.5 exposure and then create a slight S in the curve effect panel for more contrast. The result is good as far as the contrast and brightness/darkness, but very noisy.

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to brighten up the material while avoiding noise as much as possible.

I have access to After Effects and also DaVinci Resolve. I know my way around After Effects, but I would need to find somoene to help me with DaVinci.

Alternatively, if there's a way to do this directly in Premiere Pro, that would be awesome.

I've watched a few YouTube videos about working with dark footage. Most of them say to use Lighting Effects in Premiere (Light type: directional). But the results for me have not been very good trying this.

The scene was shot on a Canon 5D mark ii. I'm assuming a rather high ISO was used, which might be part of the problem.

Codec: QT 2007.09 / AVC1
Bit rate: 20.4 Mb/s
1080x1920
23.98 fps

Let me know if there's any info I haven't provided that might be useful to help you help me : )

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on this.

Thanks!

[Graeme Bull]

It's super hard to manage this kind of thing straight in Premiere, I'd suggest Red Giant's DeNoiser plugin: https://www.redgiant.com/products/magic-bullet-denoiser/ I have to see anything come close to these results with just the software

[aaddiiooss]

Thanks Graeme, I'll download a trial version tonight and test it out!

[Meg The Dog]

You might want to take a look at Neat Noise Reduction, it can so some amazing fixes:

https://www.neatvideo.com 

I believe they have a demo download.

Have not worked with the Red Giant Product so not sure how they compare.

Noise Reduction requires significant rendering time, you want to make sure you end up applying it to just the portion of video you need.

MtD

[aaddiiooss]

Thanks mtd - i'll try that too : )

[R Neil Haugen]

There's no way to lighten that media without needing the noise reduction. The one thing I'd add would be to include temporal NR of at least 3 frames width.

Neil