An interesting technique to reduce noise from high gain night shots on high definition video from Zen Films, an independent production and publishing company. They use Neat Image, a plug-in for Photoshop designed to reduce visible noise and grain in photographic images produced by digital cameras and scanners.

Noise Reduction on HiDef images
I made a great purchase this week -Neat Image noise reduction software. It’s intended for use with digital still cameras and scanners but I thought I’d give it a go with moving pictures. To use Neat Image, I first output a clip from After Effects as a sequence of TIF images. Then, in Neat Image (NI) I load in a test frame – usually one I know it’ll find a good noise profile from – and practice getting a good output image using various noise filter settings. I’ve found the noise filter presets often to be the best solution or at least a really good starting point. – more