I love my Canon R5C. It’s a Netflix-approved camera that’s capable of shooting world-class photo and video.

But this 60fps-8k-raw beast of a camera has one design flaw compared to the Sonys and other competitors: It’s pretty noisy in low light.

Crank the ISO above 3200, and the footage becomes grainier than a cafe next to the Sahara. It’s grainier than that Iowa during harvest season. I’m talkin’ grainy over here!

So for me, denoising client footage in DaVinci Resolve is a must. But anyone who denoises footage knows it can bring even great computers to a standstill.

So I had a thought: Video files are just data. Can I build a tool that analyzes the data locally and batch denoises overnight, stays in Log, preserving bit depth and fidelity, BEFORE I ever bring something into Resolve?

Like many experiments I’ve had coding with AI, the answer is yes. I can.

And I’m amazed that doing this first, before I even convert the footage to rec709, before I grade it… it works so well. It’s really incredible.

So after a long shoot, I just drag my entire folder onto my batch processing tool, and I wake up to a folder of denoised Pro-res files, ready to go.

And it’s free. And I can edit without my M1 MacBook Pro catching on fire while yelling obscenities at me in what I can only assume is… I want to say, Hungarian?

If you have a Sony camera, you don’t have to worry about this. Because noise doesn’t exist to you, you lucky, lucky devil. But if you just can’t let Canon go and you’re an idiot like me, this tip’s for you.

It’s just one of the many outside-the-box ways you can do something with AI coding that makes your life a little easier. And if we can all get an extra year or two out of our existing computers amidst all these price hikes, well, so much the better, right?