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Earlier this week I read Scott Simmon’s review of Magic Bullet’s Denoiser plug-in. I was intrigued. Scott didn’t have anything other his adorable baby footage to test the plug-in. He also made mention of thinking you’d want to apply the denoiser before grading rather than after grading. Well…

I just happened to have wrapped color correcting a 6-minute horror film shot on a Canon 7D. Obviously there was a lot of low-light footage and some of it suffered from noise and h.264 artifacting. I spent a good deal of time in Apple Color isolating and blurring out the artifacts. I also have a few other denoise plug-ins that work in FCP most of the time. But there were a few shots that defied all my attempts at fixing them.

I decided to test two things:

1. Could MB Denoiser fix the one angle that had driven me nuts and was never adequately ‘denoised’?
2. Would I see a perceptible difference in applying the filter before grading rather than after grading?

The following video review is really two parts. Part 1 (the first 11 minutes) covers some of the unique features of MB Denoiser… as well as some of its bugs. Part 2 shows my workflow and results of “Denoise Before or After?” test.

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