This is a test I ran on a piece of footage where the gain got turned up way too high while shooting. The clip was extremely dark as well so here is what I did in After Effects CS5.5 to try and salvage the shot...
Applied Shadow/Highlight filter to somewhat equalize the exposure. This, of course, enhanced the unwanted noise in the image.
Then I made two exact copies of the clip and cropped them into 3rds for comparison.
Finally I applied Red Giant's Denoiser II to the middle clip and Neat Video's Denoiser to the section on the far right.
I used the default settings on both plug-ins. And this is the result.
My next test will be to experiment with the parameters and see what happens. I will reserve my review and opinion until then.
NOTE: This is MiniDV footage shot on a Canon XLII around 2004
