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How To Remove Video Noise & Grain in Adobe Premiere Pro

Post Production Tips & Tricks

10 Dec 2019

4 Min Read

What Is Video Noise?

Noisy videos can be one of the biggest bummers to any content creator. Noise happens especially when you are shooting in a situation where the lighting is not optimal and to compensate for that you have to crank up your ISO. The way ISO works is that it will increase the sensitivity of your camera sensor to light which will also increase the amount of noise your sensor will capture. That’s when you begin to see some grain in your footage especially around shadowy portions of your video.

So what is the solution? Well, for now, there is no native solution built inside premiere so we should rely on third-party plugins. And fortunately, there are some good ones out there! For example “Neat Video” and Red Giants “Denoiser” are among the ones that are extremely popular.

How To Remove Video Noise & Grain in Premiere Pro

Denoiser III

For this post, I have decided to focus on Red Giant’s Denoiser III. Not that it is any better than the competition or anything, it’s just that I am more familiar with Denoiser and feel more confident using it. So, let’s see what Denoiser III has to offer.

Begin Denoising!

In order to get rid of all the noise inside your footage, you should go to your Effects panel and search for “Denoiser”. After finding it, Drag and Drop on it to your footage! Then check the Effects Control panel and there you can find the settings for the effect. There exist two main sections, Denoise, which is obvious what it does, and Sharpen which I will talk about in a moment.

Reduce Noise, that’s what we are here for. By default, it sits at 15. But in most cases, you need to move to the right to increase the intensity of the effect. But be careful, this is not like Coco where always more is better. Since the main method of plugins for removing noise is to analyze the pixels and then blend them with noise, using too much noise reduction means blurry and soft footage.  So make sure you use the plugin in moderation.

Video Noise Denoiser III
Video Noise Denoiser III
Video Noise Cleaned
Video Noise Fixed
Smooth Colors is the next slider that will find color noise in the video and tries to blend it with the other pixels and make the video look much better. I actually really like the smooth colors slider. I don’t know why but it always feels like it makes the picture look better and sharper. Maybe it’s just a preference or even an illusion!

Anyway, the next slider is Preserve Detail. This one really tries hard to keep the video sharp and crispy, and in most cases it is successful!

The other section is what I personally seldom use. It is totally a taste thing but sharpening, in general, is not my cup of tea. Of course, there are instances that sharpening works like a charm, but again in those instances, you should be really careful about the amount of sharpening you are adding. Because remember, sharpening will sharpen everything in the footage, and I mean everything. So, my suggestion is that if you want to sharpen, use both the sliders and work with them.

Try to keep the radius low. As the name implies, the radius will define the area size the effect is going to process. So keeping it low will make it a bit more precise.

Video Noise
Video Noise

Conclusion

One of the strong suits of Denoiser is its light nature. Of course, other plugins, like Neat Video may do a better job, but they are much more taxing on your system and workflow!

OK, thank you for sticking with me to the end! Be sure to leave your comments down in the comments section. Until the next time, best of luck and bye!