What a long, strange trip it’s been for Magic Bullet Denoiser. The quite amazing, though crash-prone, denoising tool from Red Giant Software was removed from Red Giant’s product lineup late last year when some third-party technology used in Denoiser 1 was purchased by Google. In Google’s quest to make crappy YouTube video look better, we lost one of the better denoise tools that I had ever used. Red Giant promised at the time, however, that its “team is hard at work developing a new version of Denoiser.” Well, here comes Denoiser II.

What do you get in version II? Some bullet points from the Denoiser II landing page at Red Giant:

  • Free update! Denoiser 1 and Magic Bullet Suite owners get the new version free. Download here
  • Default settings were carefully chosen by professional editors, so you get immediate clean-up results when the plug-in is applied
  • Extensive redevelopment and improved stability give you a more reliable denoising tool
  • Fix high ISO settings or high gain that cause too much noise, like footage shot in low light conditions, or dark environments like concerts or nightclubs
  • Remove noise artifacts from archival or amateur video so the results look acceptable for broadcast
  • Motion Estimation feature identifies camera vs subject motion so your footage gets cleaned accurately, whether it’s high or slow motion
  • Smooth the noise in green/bluescreen backgrounds so you can pull better chromakeys

How different is Denoiser from its original version, now owned by Google? Says Red Giant on its blog: “We’ve developed Magic Bullet Denoiser II from scratch (completely new code) to bring you the quality of Denoiser 1, but with more stability. Red Giant owns this code 100% – which means the product is not going anywhere.” That’s good news, since I do think the biggest concern many version I users have is with stability. Denoiser 1 was notorious for its crashing but even with that, it was also known to produce simply amazing results. I have seen it save many a Canon DSLR shot when much higher-priced denoise tools could not.

Denoiser II is currently only available for After Effects but support is coming for “Final Cut 7, Final Cut X and Premiere Pro by mid-2012,” according to the Red Giant blog. And if you are still having good luck with Denoiser 1, which of course continued to work after it was taken off the market, you’re in luck. According to this Red Giant tweet: “Installing Denoiser II will not overwrite or remove Denoiser 1, which means you can use both plug-ins without conflict.” These guys know how to make software—and make users happy.

Magic Bullet Denoiser II will be available for $99 as a stand-alone product and will, of course, be part of the Magic Bullet Suite. Update information is available, as is a free trial. Welcome back Denoiser II. As long as people shoot high ISO DSLRs, you’ll have a place in this world.