Hello Again Magic Bullet Denoiser

Studiodaily by Scott Simmons

What a long, strange trip it’s been for Magic Bullet Denoiser. The quite amazing, though crash-prone, denoising tool from Red Giant Software was removed from Red Giant’s product lineup late last year when some third-party technology used in Denoiser 1 was purchased by Google. In Google’s quest to make crappy YouTube video look better, we lost one of the better denoise tools that I had ever used. Red Giant promised at the time, however, that its “team is hard at work developing a new version of Denoiser.” Well, here comes Denoiser II.

What do you get in version II? Some bullet points from the Denoiser II landing page at Red Giant:

• Free update! Denoiser 1 and Magic Bullet Suite owners get the new version free. Download here
• Default settings were carefully chosen by professional editors, so you get immediate clean-up results when the plug-in is applied
• Extensive redevelopment and improved stability give you a more reliable denoising tool
• Fix high ISO settings or high gain that cause too much noise, like footage shot in low light conditions, or dark environments like concerts or nightclubs
• Remove noise artifacts from archival or amateur video so the results look acceptable for broadcast
• Motion Estimation feature identifies camera vs subject motion so your footage gets cleaned accurately, whether it’s high or slow motion
• Smooth the noise in green/bluescreen backgrounds so you can pull better chromakeys

How different is Denoiser from its original version, now owned by Google? Says Red Giant on its blog: “We’ve developed Magic Bullet Denoiser II from scratch (completely new code) to bring you the quality of Denoiser 1, but with more stability. Red Giant owns this code 100% – which means the product is not going anywhere.” That’s good news, since I do think the biggest concern many version I users have is with stability. Denoiser 1 was notorious for its crashing but even with that, it was also known to produce simply amazing results. I have seen it save many a Canon DSLR shot when much higher-priced denoise tools could not. read more...