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AE Noise Reduction with Frequency Separation

Reducing noise in video footage has been an issue for a great many years, but I think it has been more of a pressing issue since Youtube took off, and more and more people were producing videos that needed some major clean-up.

Truthfully, the better you shoot your footage initially, and the more light you use, the better your footage will look. But whether you had no choice in the way a particular shot was photographed, or if in hindsight you've realized that something is seriously wrong with the noise present in your video, we all might need some noise reduction from time to time.

Problem is, when you don't have the money to buy NeatVideo, or other third-party NR plugins, what are you supposed to do? Well I think I may have found the answer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8bwrVuNmzc

Taking tips and advice from a few different videos and posts by other adobe users, I have devised a technique for smoothing out heavy color artifacting and noise from anywhere in a video: although it is most effective over specific (ranges of) colors or over your shadow areas, rather than the entire image itself. The technique is strong and noticeable if done across the whole shot, so it's something that should be used in more focused regions.

The technique I use is based on a popular existing technique for touching up professional photographs in Photoshop, called Frequency Separation, by isolating and separating the color information from the edge and texture information: thus allowing each to be affected independently.

I've never seen a tutorial explaining how Frequency Separation can be done in After Effects, let alone to video footage itself. So once I figured out how, I had to make sure I made a video about it for others to reference in their own work.

I hope you all find it useful.
 
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