H.264 playback nightmare

[Stereodude]

That does look better. What did it take to get there?
I processed every frame as a photo with Noise Ninja in Photoshop and then ran MCTD on that for some light additional cleanup.

[flyvholm]

Figured it wasn't going to be easy. :) I'll have to stick to Neat Video for now. It's good enough that very few people will be bothered, it's a heck of a lot easier/faster, and I already have the tools I need. I don't have Noise Ninja and have a very tight budget these days. But thanks a lot for showing what's possible. Having seen your results it's quite likely I'll pick up Noise Ninja and go through the image sequences later when time/funds allow.

[flyvholm]

I processed every frame as a photo with Noise Ninja in Photoshop and then ran MCTD on that for some light additional cleanup.
Do you remember what you did more specifically? I'm playing with a trial of Photo Ninja, and if I reduce the noise significantly I get blotchy artifacts in the foreground snow, changing from frame to frame. Did you mask out the foreground when treating with Noise Ninja?

[Stereodude]

Do you remember what you did more specifically? I'm playing with a trial of Photo Ninja, and if I reduce the noise significantly I get blotchy artifacts in the foreground snow, changing from frame to frame. Did you mask out the foreground when treating with Noise Ninja?
I used Noise Ninja, which was the predecessor to Photo Ninja. I didn't do any masking. I combined 4 sequential frames from the start of the video into one larger tiled image and used that to generate an automatic noise profile. I used that noise profile for all the frames. I used these settings.

http://i.imgur.com/3SIUufb.png

[flyvholm]

Hmm, the interface changed quite a bit. Difficult to translate the numbers, and changes in the processing engine might make a difference as well - though, the engine dropdown menu has NN 3 in it as well, and that gave me similar, changing blotches in the foreground.

http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-interface.jpg

Do you remember your MCTD settings? I'll play with that as well to see how it compares to Neat Video.

[Stereodude]

Hmm, the interface changed quite a bit. Difficult to translate the numbers, and changes in the processing engine might make a difference as well - though, the engine dropdown menu has NN 3 in it as well, and that gave me similar, changing blotches in the foreground.

http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-interface.jpg

Do you remember your MCTD settings? I'll play with that as well to see how it compares to Neat Video.
Mine is version 2.x. Can you post a picture after processing with the blotches?

I'll paste my MCTD settings later when I get home.

Edit: Here are my MCTD settings. I use one of these. They're in order from weakest to strongest.

#MCTemporalDenoise(settings="low")
#MCTemporalDenoise(settings="low", radius=3)
#MCTemporalDenoise(settings="low", radius=3, sigma=6, SHmode=3, useEEDI2=false, quant1=30, quant2=60, ECrad=4, ECmode="Removegrain(3,-1)", maxr=3, TTstr=2, GFthr=1.6, thSAD=400, thSAD2=400, thSCD1=400)
#MCTemporalDenoise(settings="medium")

[flyvholm]

Two samples (adjacent frames) here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-sample-1.jpg) and here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-sample-2.jpg), corresponding originals here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/DSC_3018.JPG) and here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/DSC_3019.JPG). Compare the two to see how the snow at the bottom changes. This was with default "smart preset" settings as shown above and needs significant additional cleanup. As you can imagine, if I adjust either of the luminance sliders towards stronger smoothing it only gets worse. I tried using the 1920x1080 crops you were working with and additional cleanup with Neat Video. Better, but still quite visible artifacts. In your sample the foreground is fine.

[flyvholm]

Ok, after improving the Neat Video treatment in After Effects I've produced what IMO is the best result so far - download here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/Title-Neat-x264-crf18.mp4). Admittedly, on a neutral display I suspect most people would prefer Stereodude's Ninja-version because it looks cleaner and crisper, though some critical viewers would prefer the more natural looking sky (stars in particular) in my Neat-version. However, add the vicious default sharpening that many displays apply and the situation is different. Comparing the two samples on VLC with sharpness cranked up, the Neat-version has less halos and a steady image. The Ninja-version looks nervous with artificial movement that is particularly visible in the snow and along the horizon. This is the same problem with smoothing changing between frames that I was complaining about above, just better concealed.

The Neat-version has some dark pixels peppered around the image though. These are pixels that are darker than their neighbors on average. Not enough to be noticeable at low ISO or even in a single image at high ISO due to noise. But when a temporal filter has smoothed out noise, these dark pixels remain - see image below. Spatial smoothing can take them out, but at the price of unreasonable loss of detail. It would be relatively straightforward to filter such isolated dark pixels out without having to spatially smooth the whole image, but I have not found a utility to do so. Suggestions? These dark pixels are numerous enough that I'm hesitant to start mapping them individually...

http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/Dark-pixels.jpg

[Stereodude]

Two samples (adjacent frames) here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-sample-1.jpg) and here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/NN4-sample-2.jpg), corresponding originals here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/DSC_3018.JPG) and here (http://thetimelapsephotographer.com/shared/forums/DSC_3019.JPG). Compare the two to see how the snow at the bottom changes. This was with default "smart preset" settings as shown above and needs significant additional cleanup. As you can imagine, if I adjust either of the luminance sliders towards stronger smoothing it only gets worse. I tried using the 1920x1080 crops you were working with and additional cleanup with Neat Video. Better, but still quite visible artifacts. In your sample the foreground is fine.
Yikes NN4 hardly seems like it's improving the image any. There's less Chroma noise, but there's still a lot of Luma noise (perhaps just as much as the source), and it seems like it sharpened and brightened the image. Here's what NN2.3.5 did to your two original images. First (http://stereodude.net/DSC_3018_NN2.jpg) & Second (http://stereodude.net/DSC_3019_NN2.jpg).

[flyvholm]

Well, the "smart preset" obviously wasn't fit in this case. When I say it gets worse for stronger smoothing I mean in terms of the consistency between frames, which is all important for my use. For single images NN4 can also produce good results. But because of the frame-to-frame differences I don't think I'll be able to use software that processes the frames individually. I also tested Topaz Denoise, same story.