How do you feel about improving your completed works or, if you are a consumer, about other people changing their films? For example, I read that Ridley Scott decided to have the sound design in Blade Runner updated for its 25th anniversary, citing technological assumptions (e.g., hydro-electric power sources) not being in tune with today’s world. I do not know if the article is true, but it would be disappointing if so. Blade Runner to me represents a projection of the future; a possible one… an interesting one. So what if it turned out differently? Besides, mistakes are fun to catch, so long as they do not distract.

I tweak my work all the time from festival to festival, but if I had a feature I would draw the line at theatrical release. After that, one more cut for DVD (the director’s cut) and move on to the next film.

I posed this question to Zeki Demirkubuz at this year’s Boston Turkish Film Festival and he said the notion of never completing a film made him restless. How do you feel?

Last month Eugene and I helped shoot a zombie film by Max Bowen called Survival Instinct, as gaffer and second cinematographer (me), and boom operator (Eugene). In between takes we took pictures. Here are two of mine:

Thanks to Eugene for the group picture; check out my hat:

For OTW I had some noisy indoor footage captured with an XL2 in 2:3:3:2 (aka 24P advanced) mode. Naturally I was looking for a way to clean it so I decided to use avisynth, since it has a wide array of good free noise reduction plug-ins. Since the state of the art is always changing, I spent some time looking through the archives of doom9 (where all the avisynth enthusiasts are). I discovered a great FFT-based denoising filter called FFT3DGPU ^[1]. As you have no doubt guessed, this is because this filter takes advantage of your GPU! I thought it would improve performance so I gave it a try. Apparently it is a port of a well-known filter called FFT3Dfilter, which performs noise reduction in the frequency domain. Most other filters are spatial, temporal, or both (spatio-temporal).

The results are excellent, but before I show them, let me go through the avisynth script, since there are some points of special interest to XL2 users. Normally one would simply use a script like this:
avisource("file")
fft3dgpu
However one can obtain better results by eliminating the extraneous telecined frames. Progressive frames allow for more effective spatial noise reduction. It also makes for smaller files when you save the filtered clip. The way to do that is with the SelectEvery command. As its name suggests, this command selectively retains frames. By selecting only the progressive frames, we can pull down the 60i clip to 24P, like so:
SelectEvery(5,0,1,3,4)
This instructs avisynth to drop every second frame out of a group of five, thereby reducing its frame rate from 59.94i=29.97P to 23.97P. You might have to use a different set of numbers after the five in order to select the one interlaced frame.

The FFT3Dgpu filter accepts many parameters, the most important of which is the sigma setting, which controls the strength of the noise reduction. It’s a matter of trial and error to see how much cleaning your clip requires. You want to ensure that your denoised clip looks natural beside clips it abuts, if they are part of the same scene. Do not aim to clean every last bit of noise.

My finished script looks like this:
avisource("file")
SelectEvery(5,0,1,3,4)
fft3dgpu(sigma=3)
coloryuv(levels="pc->tv")

The last line accounts for the fact that the lagarith codec does not encode using the ITU-R 601 color space. Without it, your clip will have clipped highlights and shadows. Then I set the video mode in Virtualdub to Fast Recompress to avoid a color space conversion (i.e., staying in YUY2 for DV) and writing a lagarith file also in YUY2.

Finally, I insert the clip in Vegas by adding another take to the existing clip so I can easily switch back and forth with. Of course, this requires you to have already trimmed the clip in Virtualdub to the correct position.

1. ↑1 Users who wish to stay in their compositing application (e.g., After Effects) may be interested in RevisionFX’s brand-new plug-in, DE:noise.