Cleaning up bad video quality?

[skidmark steve]

Hi guys..

I am editing together a documentary which uses a lot of clips that contain bad quality footage. Some clips were filmed on cell phones, and on lower quality cameras. Also, some quality might have been lost from being taken from the web (some are flv format). I was wondering what filters I could use in FCP, or any other program to help make these clips look as best as they can on dvd.

Thanks!

 

[BenB]

OK, not a simple question to answer. There is no magical "clean up bad video" filter. You're going to need to use a variety of filters, probably. Nattress Plugins are great, have a good noise filter. But it's a "noise reduction" filter, there is no such thing as a "noise removal" filter. You will want to do some color correction with the Color Corrector 3-Way filter, or better yet, in the Color application. Other filters to look at are the Gama and Gama Control filters, Channel filters (that gets a bit advanced), the Proc Amp filter could be very handy (just play with the controls, you'll understand it easily), and the Smooth Cam filter.

It will take a variety of filters to make bad video look "better", but you'll never get bad video to look "great". So, experiment with the filters I suggested, try to use as few filters as possible on each clip, and strive to "improve" it some, not make it "great". That's all you can hope for.

 

[grinner]

The bare bones trooth is ya can't.
You can hide imperfections with glows and blurs though. You may also think about PIP effects rather than full screen.

 

[Kim Welch]

use the bad quality

use the bad quality

you might edit so that you use the bad quality to create a look and feel.