How to Remove Noise from Video with AI and Non-AI Tools

You thought you’ve shot the video perfectly, and everything goes exactly as planned. However, when you finally play your video, only to see there is too much noise (visible grains) in your footages? Oops! It’s not just bad luck, things like this always happen. When shooting a video, especially under lowlight conditions or with a higher camera ISO setting, there will always be some noise. So the only thing left you can do is to remove or reduce that annoying noise during the post production stage, with a 3^rd party noise reduction software. Then here comes the question, how to remove noise from video? This is why this article is written for. Read on to find the answers that can help you remove noise from video.

Section 1. Introduction to video noise

Before we are able to remove noise from a video, it’s better we have an overall idea of the types of video noise and the reasons that cause the noise. The most common types of video noise include internal noise and interference noise. Internal noise can be further subdivided into many types, such as Gaussian Noise, Fixed-Pattern Noise, Salt and Pepper Noise, Shot, Quantization, Anisotropic. While interference noise is usually referred to as Periodic noise which occurs when any number of natural or man-made signals interferes with the recorded signal. It typically appears as a fixed pattern overlay on top of the desired image.  

• Gaussian noise: As a side-effect of sensor heat resulted from the voltage and illumination levels of the sensor, Gaussian noise is most noticeable as a constant, fluttering across an underexposed, over-volted (ISO pushed to get exposure) frame. In most sensors, this noise will tend to be blue in underexposed images.
• Salt and Pepper Noise: Usually caucused by analog-to-digital conversion or other errors in pixel interpretation and looks very similar to dead pixels, Salt and Pepper noise is technically referred to as either Fat-tail distributed or Impulsive noise that manifests as pixels erroneously reporting bright readouts in dark parts of the frame or dark readouts in bright parts.
• Shot: Mainly appear in darker parts of the image and technically dubbed as Photon Shot Noise, Shot Noise results from the natural, inherent variation in photons striking each pixel at any given time, based on the exposure level. It is the biggest cause of the blockiness in the shadows of an underexposed or over-volted shot.
• Quantization: In video, Quantization noise is usually undetectable as all pixels will be more or less affected equally. Errors can occur when the image clips far beyond the extreme ends of quantization values of the A/D converter. It can also be made significantly worse by strong noise of other types in the image.
• Anisotropic: This type of noise in video cameras usually manifests when the native sensor resolution is much higher than that being recorded. Many older cameras opted to sample the higher resolution down to recorded resolution rather than simply scaling output to fit, causing much of the terrible aliasing and moire of early large-format video sensors.

Section 2. The best AI-powered software to remove noise from video

Powered by the latest cutting-edge artificial intelligence, super-resolution and neural network technologies, UniFab Video Enlarger AI is the best AI-driven video enhancement software the market has ever seen. Among many of its video enhancement features, its AI de-noising algorithms are specifically designed to identify and reduce all types of noise from your videos.

The best thing about this video noise reducer is that it will perform the noise automatically during the process of enhancing the video quality. You don’t need to do any extra parameter settings manually other than just one or two clicks to proceed the process.

UniFab Video Enlarger AI

This is a professional AI upscaling tool designed to improve video quality, such as removing noise, enlarging video up to 4k, enhancing video clarity and quality, etc.

Features:

• Restore your low-res videos into 720p/1080p/4k content
• Enhance video clarity to a more realistic and vivid visual effect
• Support video editing to meet your personalized demand
• Get 50x faster speed with GPU acceleration

Section 3. Non-AI software to remove noise from video

There are also some non-AI video editing software tools that are able to remove noise from video, such as the After Effects from Adobe, the Final Cut Pro X from Apple, the DaVinci Resolve Studio and the Neat Video from ABsoft, etc. Here in this section, we’ll talk a little bit about these tools respectively.

3.1 How to remove noise from video using After Effects

Among the many features offered by After Effects, it is the Remove Grain that actually does the job to remove noise from video footages. However, by smoothing out the video footages to smooth out those noise artifacts, the program is also blurring everything a tiny bit. The downside of this is that some details and sharpness can be removed from the image at the same time. So, it’s a little bit techy to make the balance.

See the steps below how to remove noise from video with After Effects:

Step 1 — After loading the video footages that you want to remove noise from, locate the Remove Grain feature from the Effects & Presets panel and then apply the effect. A small rectangle will appear on top of your noisy footages. This rectangle is the preview region, giving you a preview of what your footages will look like with the final effect applied.

Step 2 — To see the noise removed from your entire video footages, just switch the Viewing Mode to Final Output.

Be aware that doing this may slow down your computer as the Remove Grain effect is a computation intensive process.

Step 3 — Apply some relevant settings to optimize your final video footages. The primary settings for the Remove Grain effect are the Noise Reduction Settings that you can try out to control how aggressively you want After Effects to reduce noise from video footages. Higher values will remove more noise, but potentially also make your video slightly blurry.

• Available on: both Windows and macOS
• Pricing: $19.99/month

3.2 How to remove noise from video using Final Cut Pro X

Starting from version 10.4.4, Apple finally decided to bring the Noise Reduction filter to its Final Cut Pro X video editing software. The newly added filter is specifically designed to quickly reduce noise from video.

Refer to the guides below to see how to remove noise from video using the latest Final Cut Pro X:

Step 1 — Add the noisy video footage into the Timeline.
Step 2 — Go to Effects Browser > Basics and drag the Noise Reduction effect onto the video footage.

Step 3 — Adjust the Amount menu to dial out the amount of noise you want to remove. Your settings will vary based upon the amount of noise in the image and how much you want to remove.

• Available on: macOS
• Pricing: $299 for a perpetual license

3.3 How to remove noise from video using DaVinci Resolve Studio

As a very powerful video editing and color grading program, DaVinci Resolve also comes with a built-in noise reduction feature, but only with its paid version named DaVinci Resolve Studio.

Refer to the guides below to see how to remove noise from video using DaVinci Resolve Studio:

Step 1 — Open the Motion effects panel, you will see that the noise reduction is controlled by the Temporal NR and Spatial NR relevant settings.

Step 2 — Enhance the viewer mode to help create new mode, and zoom in so that you can check deep details.
Step 3 — Now start with the less destructive Temporal Noise Reduction option: select two frames for comparison, select your desired motion estimation type, make selection for motion range and then adjust the temporal threshold settings as per need. Use Command D to check the de-noise effect when necessary.

Step 4 — Then move back to Spatial NR to adjust the settings there: after done with Temporal NR, it is suggested that you make minimal adjustments here.
Step 5 — Change the mode and radius settings if needed. Make adjustments for Chroma values, Luma and blend mode from Special threshold panel.

• Available on: both Windows and macOS
• Pricing: $299 for a perpetual license

3.4 How to remove noise from video using Neat Video

Available as a plug-in for many popular video editing software tools such as Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro (X), DaVinci Resolve (Studio) and more, Neat Video is a digital filter specifically designed to reduce visible noise and grain found in video footages from digital video cameras, DSLRs, TV-tuners and even digitized film or VHS.

• Available on: both Windows, macOS and Linux
• Pricing: start from $74.9 for a perpetual license

Key features at a glance:

• Premium noise reduction and sharpening
• Intuitive noise profiling
• Instant visual feedback
• Comprehensive host integration
• Excellent hardware optimization

Section 4. Final Thought

Video noise is a common problem when shooting videos, especially in an environment where lighting condition is poor, or with a higher ISO setting, or with small sensors that are usually found on mobile phones or action cameras like the GoPro. So, it’s easy to think that next time when shooting videos, try best to get as much light as possible onto the subject can maximally avoid noise in the final video. However, the fact is that no matter how hard you try, there is always gonna be some noise.

This is way we need to resolve to 3^rd party video denoising software to help us remove noise from videos. With traditional non-AI video editing software, like the ones we’ve mentioned in this article, it’s not hard to find that it’s not that easy to completely remove all the noise from video without hurting the original visual quality of the video. And for another thing, not only all these non-AI software tools are a little bit expensive, they are also too complicated for common users without too much knowledge on video editing.

However, with AI-assisted video editing software like UniFab Video Enlarger AI, you can leave the entire noise reduction thing to the software itself, without the need to tweak settings one by one with your own hands. Plus the fact that video denoising is quite computing intensive, and UniFab support the latest GPU hardware acceleration from Nvidia, AMD and Intel chips, and batch processing as well, it is the best choice to make.