Noise cleanup on footage: filter?

Hi all.
Some of the DV footage I've shot was not lit as well as it could have been. I knew it at the time, but it was either get the shot, or not. I tried my best to use available light, but some footage is a bit dark.
Also, in a somewhat related point, mini DV footage at 720 x 480 is pretty low resolution when viewed on the ever increasing sizes of flat screens.
I'm wondering if there exists a filter or process in FCP 5 that can clean up some of the noise in DV footage due to low light.
Equally, is there any way to make DV footage look even better at higher resolutions?
Thanks
humbleradio

I recently had to deal with a great deal of noise in DV footage and struggled to clean it up enough to make it useable. I plan to write up something on the technique I developed for it, but I'm still working on the project, so can't take the time right now, but I can give a few pointers.
I used Shake to deal with the problem, but I think it would be possible to apply similar techniques within FCP. First of all, noise amounts to unwanted or distracting variation between frames. This can be reduced with frame averaging - achieved in FCP thru the Motion Blur panel of the Motion pane in the Viewer in FCP.
With frame averaging, the noise should mostly disappear, but then, of course, one is left with trails on any movement. If what you shot has very little movement, you might be done right there, unfortunately for me I had no small amount of movement to deal with.
I reasoned that if I took a frame averaged "clean" frame, and subtracted the original "noisy" image from it, I would end up with a noise image. This I then subtracted from the original image and did an expand color correct to bring the darkened image back into line, exposure wise. This would be achieved in FCP with layering the a Motion Blurred (frame averaged clip) with the original image and using the Composite Mode Subtract to get your "noise pass". Then export/import that and layer it with the original image, again using Composite mode subtract. Export/import the result and apply a color corrector to brighten it back up.
At this point I saw a vast improvement, and lost most of the "traily" artifacts of the averaged frame. I then constructed a threshold matte from the original image and put the largely non-noisy brighter areas back into the image. You would do this in FCP by using a luma key to layer the original image over the now corrected clip and set your threshold to only pass the better exposed non noisy areas of the original clip.
It's no small amount of work, and my final result was pretty good, but it took 7 hours to render 4 and a half minutes of selects.
I hope this helps some. Good luck, post back.
Patrick

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