Getting the best from Neat Video

[Fly-Catchers]

I am currently working on some concert footage I took in London last year. It was on my unhacked GH2 HBR 25p. Using my Canon 50mm lens set to F3.5/4. The ISO was 400 and I was using the Ex Tele mode.
During the darker moments of the concert and in the shadows there is quite a bit of noise as expected. For my first attempt I used brightness/contrast & Shadow/highlight settings in PE 10 NLE. I them applied Neat Video. As I had a fixed camera position there is only one area that appears suitable for the software to use and after applying it I also added a second adjustment to the same area when the lighting increased. This added a bit to the profile but did not allow to fill in all the boxes on the Neat Video profile. I used the default settings. Overall the result is quite good but there is still a fair bit of noise movement in the darker areas. On a second attempt I also added the default Gamma correction to the mix which lightened the image quite a bit and also changed the Temporal filter radius to 2. However overall this increased the noisy area movement still further. I will be uploading my first attempt shortly. I am still using the demo version of Neat Video but as luck would have it the area it covers shows the most important part of the video for assessment.


Are the adjustments I am using in PE brightness/contrast & Shadow/highlight and perhaps Gamma Correction the right ones to use? Any tips as to give the best base for Neat Video to work with?

 

http://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/2195-laurie-anderson-dirt-day-concert-clip-testing-neat-video/

cheers!

[nahua]

This is just my experience, but I shot a white wall with different ISO settings to get the noise characteristics.  So then I made a profile for the ISOs I use most - 640, 1250, 2500, 5000.  I even made one for anamorphics too.  Now I just base it on the ISO I shot the footage.  Quick and dirty and doesn't always work, but I get great results 90% of the time.