The DNR version is coming along quite nicely I think:
Wow, those are a marked improvement. Can anyone explain exactly how the DNR process is being handled? It definitely doesn’t have the “waxy” look one might associate with DNR.
The levels of grain and noise in Star Wars vary scene to scene and shot to shot. So I split the entire film into shots and I’m applying Neat Video’s Denoise filter to each shot, one at a time, and adjusting the settings. Often, for example when characters are talking, a scene is split into three camera angles - over Luke’s shoulder, over Ben’s shoulder, wide shot and the edit cycles back and forth between the angles. Unless there are SFX in some of these shots, the same settings can usually be used for all of the shots from the same angle, so the neatvideo settings can be resused without having to set everything up again, which makes it go faster. In this fashion I was able to denoise all of reel 1 on Sunday.
Besides Denoising, I am also sharpening the image a little - removing the sharp grain makes the image look softer.
Finally, I regrain with nice clean (real - not emulated) film grain.