Take time to do a proper noise profile. It´s super easy to do, if you select a frame with some clear surfaces; highlight, mid and low.. (you can use the same setting for the same iso / shot with the same lens). Play with the averaging function - it´s quite effective for nearly static shots. Neat video will do the job, depending on how delicate the footage is. You can re-grain the footage afterwards, so don´t worry too much if it gets a bit smooth, but see also if you can make use of the sharpening function. (there are good tutorials about all of this from NV, you will save time if you check it out!)

Thank you all so much for the replies and advice, it is much appreciated. I will buy neatvideo tonight when I get home.

@spacewig You won't regret it. @apefos has some great ideas. I'm sure it will rescue your ISO bug footage and be well worth the expense.

I prefer it in After Effects personally, since you can max out your CPU's resources when rendering it. Not sure if the Premiere version has the same multicore acceleration or not.

@apefos +1

The denoising can be done after color work (sometimes the color work emphasizes noise) but it should be done before fades, etc.

Narrow your choices to a few profiles, and experiment with adding some sharpening if needed. Then consider the following: does your vid look the same, or does it change? Then render out a few clips with your top three choices and look on a big screen. Do not pixel peep as it is a waste of time of course. Then either profile each scene or set the program to adaptively look at the scenes which runs slower. Consider exporting lossless, then reimporting for final editing as the program runs slow even on eight cores (it uses multicore in Premiere). Lastly, even if you set it at 35 percent NR and 35 percent sharpening, you will get a very nice improvement without much trouble. Don't overdo the NR which is the most common mistake, I most often set the slider at 35% and rarely go over 40. If you overdo the NR you will get plastic.

No problem. For complex projects, I will render out the clip with the scaling (motion) and the NR (Neat Video) either lossless or a high bitrate H264 or Cineform if I'm also using speedgrade, or whatever. Then I reimport the clip to add the final edits. The reason to do this is twofold. One, if you are stacking effects, the order is determined by you, and the scaling is done BEFORE anything else. The second is that Neat Video won't really play back in real time, especially if you have Red Giant stacked on top or other GPU intensive effects. So basically you can then really see your effects in real time, assuming you are using CUDA playback, which everyone should be using.

Just bought Neat Video for AE last night, and it soundly crushes Denoiser II. The temporal NR is the key. I was able to eliminate sooo much noise in an iDynamic shot at ISO 160 where the dark parts looked like they were at 3200. Easily worth the $99, and renders infinitely faster than Denoiser.

NeatVideo is great, hard to balance noise removal and making your footage not too soft. I usually have problems with skin.

Not bad. I used to do that in photoshop to blur out web compression then add grain to sharpen it back up. Also used to do something similar to DV footage by doubling the layer blurring it out, and setting it to "add" to fix both noise and exposure.... Then adding grain to mask the blur. 10 bit is fine, but that's a really light grade. If yer going heavy better go 32. Or you'll get banding.

Question for the GH3 guys, under what conditions are you using Neat Video? Is it only during low light or are you applying it globally? Like most folks, I'm shooting at NR -5 picture profile so looking for input from fellow GH3 users. Thanks.

@SuperSet , what a name! First I try to stay away from this fucker most possible, he's a slow eater :P
Then when it has to be; not only in low light / high iso, also depends on light-background quality and camera-lenses used; I really try to keep it to the minimum possible. In the last video I used it there was a lot of salt and fine grain which neatvideo voraciously wanted to stuff away, I tried a color channel separation and went harder on the chroma noise... it worked, more or less, even with sensitivity and effect to the bare minimum some salt got spoiled (bad luck?). Unfortunately I didn't know Matthew technique - first video above.
Here -5 ºC too, je je

Finally a friend insisted I should denoise after grading but, though my tests show he's right, normally at this point of the game I have no time for "delicacies" (pushing deadlines) and actually prefer a nice fat orgasmic grain, film scan or like so

@tinyrobot If you doing the denoise-dither process right, it could be a compression problem; have a look here - Best HD settings for Vimeo and then here - Handbrake presets and other x264 settings to see if it helps