Where is the option for scanline noise removal?

Question

In Compressor 2, there is Noise Removal filter. The problem with this is that the noise removal seems to operate on a frame basis, rather than a field basis.
If you are working with progressive material, this will not be an issue apart from the inherent softening of the image.
If you are working with interlaced material, then the filter will operate vertically across fields, which will be a big problem if you have horizontal movement in the frame. This horizontal movement can be seen at the edges of interlaced frames as a 'comb' effect, caused by each field being offset by (usually) 1/50th or 1/60th of a second. In a lot of cases you want to preserve this sharp combing if all you want to do is change codecs and not deinterlace the video.
There doesn't seem to be any way of reducing the noise in a field without being affected by the other field. Setting the noise reduction to Chroma Channels (instead of all channels) does reduce this effect, but does not eliminate it.
A filter that blurred only horizontally in a frame would be a reasonable subtitute for the missing scanline noise removal.
Anyone else frustrated by this?
Bill Lee

Answer 1

You could use a tool like JES Deinterlacer to produce a double frame rate or double length (50 fps for PAL) deinterlaced DV output and then run a noise removal filter on that output. Following that you could re-interlace the video back to 25 fps (PAL). However, you are going through a decompression/recompression step on the video but at least the noise removal would be operating independently within the original odd/even fields. Frankly, I'm not certain that this would produce any practical (visible) improvement over what you would get from your so-called "frame" based noise removal.
There is also a JES Video Cleaner utility that has quite a few options and both of these programs are freeware and available for download from VersionTracker.com.