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Welcome to this chapter on the Noise and Grain Effects.
We're going to be talking a lot about Noise and a lot about Grain as we go through the
various effects in this chapter. Now, Noise and Grain in your image is not
necessarily a bad things, sometimes it gives a character and flavor,
sometimes it makes it more look like films, sometimes it helps other elements to composite
together, so as we go through this chapter you will
see some effects that actually add noise, some take it away,
some allow us to compare two layers, and to combine them so that their noise matches,
and all sorts of stuff. It's also important to take into consideration
that Noise does play a big role in many other features aside from just visual
aesthetics. For example, if you're going to be doing like
blue screen work, where you're trying to get rid of the blue screen or something
for compositing, sometimes you can key that out better if it doesn't have as much Noise
and Grain in it. Also, for compression, if you're going to
send something out to DVD or to the Web, if you have less Noise then your file is going
to compress better. So here is a smattering of some of the effects,
some of the highlights of the stuff we'll be covering as we go through out this chapter.
There are certainly more, I haven't set up some examples of Noise HLS, and Noise HLS
Auto, which actually are really cool effects as
well. We even go through the Noise effects and make
a static TV and do some fun little tricks with that, and I don't have examples
of that here, I just want to hit on a few highlights.
There are three powerhouse Noise and Grain effects that stand out from all the others
when we're talking about removing noise and all that kind of stuff, and that are the
Grain effects; Add Grain, Match Grain, and Remove Grain.
Add Grain, let's say I have this CG render here, which are notoriously too clean and
too perfect when compositing, and I could use this Add Grain effect to add
some simple grain, and look at that, it looks a little bit more rough
around the edges, it looks like Herbie, the robot, has been caught on film, and it looks
much better and more realistic. We're also going to talk about Matching Grain.
Here we have Paavo doing some unicycle tricks, composited in, and we have the CD background
here, and they really don't look like they belong
next to each other. Paavo has like some Noise on his shirt and
stuff, and this computer generated render is just absolutely clean, spotless,
and perfect, they don't look like they fit together.
It does even more to call attention to the fakeness and the digitalness of this background.
So we're going to use the Match Grain effect to capture a Noise profile from Paavo, and
apply it to this background. So even though this background doesn't look
that good, its still looks much more believable when composited with Paavo,
because its using the Noise profile based on the Noise in his layer.
Also, of course, we're going to be looking at removing noise, this little swatch is an
example of the Remove Noise effect. Look at that -- these are the default settings,
by the way. We have this Cancun footage, and if you look
really closely here, there are all sorts of Grain and Noise, compression artifacts,
and this Noise is just generally making these clouds really ugly.
With the default settings, look how clean the textures are in the cloud, it looks just
spectacular, no detail has been lost, and yet all of the grain and gunk that we
don't want is gone, and this is just a spectacular result.
Now, there is also a freak in this section of Noise & Grain, it does not belong whatsoever,
and that's Fractal Noise, probably my all-time favorite After Effects
effect. Fractal Noise has nothing to do with any of
these other effects, but Fractal Noise is basically a gray scale pattern generator.
It probably would be more at home in the Generate category.
As a matter of fact, it has another effect called Cell Pattern,
that's almost exactly like it, that actually is in the Generate category.
So if you go to Fractal Noise, you will see that I have made some Fractal fire here, and
this is exactly what we're going to do when we get to the movie on Fractal
Noise. We're going to make some fire from scratch
just using Fractal Noise, and then one little plug in to colorized it as well.
So as you can see, we have got some interesting stuff ahead of us,
so let's jump into it and look at the Noise and Grain Effects.