It’s no secret that the chips that power video cameras are balanced more towards blue light (daylight) than orange light (tungsten, inside lighting). The RED One is no exception, and it’s not usually a problem. Unless you’re dealing with footage that is underexposed and shot indoors, and shot using tungsten lighting.

This was the situation from a recent shoot we did in Burbank. And using our 80D filter on the camera didn’t really help a lot because the lighting was already so low.

Now, if this happened today we’d have been using the new RED firmware build that gives much better results in these situations. But we couldn’t afford to go back and reshoot, so we were stuck.

Luckily, the RED community (special thanks to the 4K Ninjas for their constant experimentation and helpfulness) is on the case- there’s a plugin for After Effects called NeatVideo Pro that can seriously reduce the blue channel noise that happens in these situations.

We bought a copy. It’s magic. Suddenly, unusable footage is looking very, very good. Greenscreen keys that took a nodetree that looked insane in Shake are now easily keyed with one click inside Keylight. And I’m talking wispy hair and all. Amazing.

So we’re getting the word out- if you shoot or edit RED, get this plugin. Now! It’s only $100, and can save you tens of thousands of dollars while making it possible for you to deliver shots that your clients will utterly love.