High quality low light footage work flow.

nCaine

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Well since i got this cam mostly for low light situations (bunkers and other abandoned places).
I was devastated by it performance in these conditions, i started thinking and working my way thru all night scripts etc etc.
Nothing worked. Until i reversed the whole proces.

Dont have time to go into details now. But im super exited so i post some stills.
Taken from vanilla Yi and from my moded one with the workflow.
I recored with two cams for comprasion.

Keep in mind i dint crush the blacks , for you to see what heppening in the shadow areas.
It was recorded in 2K. taken stills and enlarged them to 200%

It will sound bold , but i think this kills the GoPro 4 night performan

The Guide ;)

First i have to make fee things clear:
1. If you dont intend to post proces you footage, you can stop reading now. Footage straight from the cam will be unusable.
2. You gonna need editing software with plugin called NEAT VIDEO.
3. The workflow is real eazy, but need a lot of procesing power. Since all work that cam is doing normaly, will be done in post.
4. Bitrate cant be lower that 35mbit (dint try the 50mbit yet, but probable could pull out even better quality)
5. Lens rectification MUST BE TURNED OFF (dont worry, we fix that in post too)
6. Auto Low Light MUST BE TURNED OFF.



So the first part of that workflow is getting a footage that is closest to RAW as possible.

I use moded 35mbit firmware (thx Fried)
https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threads/xiaomi-yi-custom-firmware-with-lastest-revision.13557/

As base i used YIMAX-MOVIE script (thx nutsey)
http://nutseynuts.blogspot.com/2015/06/xiaomi-yi-action-cam-custom-scripts.html

Turn off lens rectification
Turn off auto low light


If you did above steps, now you shuld get super noisy footage :) But also with all details we need. Now just need to separate them.




The second part of the workflow is denoice and sharpenig.

Now you take that footage to you editing software (in my case Premiere Pro 6)
Drop the neat video plugin on it.


And now all the magic happens.

Neat Video is a scene aware denoice plugin. You need to create noice profile.
Im not going in to details of it , ther are tutorials on yt.
But this is esential part of whole workflow, The better the profile the better the results.
You may use diffrent way of denoicing , but the final product will not be so good as with neat video.
(neat video can utilize all your cores + GPU, you need to configure it in the preferences)
IMPORTANT: set TEMPORAL FILTER RADIUS to 5.


After denoice, you can do things like unsharp mask, lens dissortion (remove fish eye), color corection and grading.

My rig whit is core2quad slacr OC`ed to 3.0 ghz with nVidia 650 Ti , renders 20 sconds in 10 minutes.
Yes, it eats my PC.


And thats it.


Sample clip (almos no light at all)
I dint have time to create perfect profile the second clip. So its not perfect.
 

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Nice work. The difference is huge! Look forward to hearing more.
 
Looking forward to hear more!

Skickat från min Nexus 5 via Tapatalk
 
Without comparison before and after I have no idea if there's actually any difference.
 
Drive clip. You can compare this to other people 2K low light clips on yt.

 
Awesome guide! Here's a sample frame from my Yi. Huge difference in quality in the background and on the banana on the right.

Original:

4c62e671d5.jpg


Filtered:

5597bc79d5.jpg
 
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