Standalone Denoiser tool: how to denoise and save effectResult channel?

[briareos_kerensky]

I have an animation of 200 frames, rendered with V-Ray 3.1 in 3ds Max 2020; there's a glow/bloom effect applied, and V-Ray saves it to the "effectResult" channel as usual. I'm using the standalone denoiser tool to remove noise from the animation, but I've stumbled on a problem: the denoiser tool deletes the effectResult channel. I can see the denoiser tool correctly loading the channel and denoising it, but upon loading the denoised frames, the effectResult channel is gone; both Photoshop and After Effects don't display the channel.

With the RGB element set as the main denoise element, the RGB channel is denoised and correctly saved, but the effectResult channel is gone.
With the effectResult channel set as the main element, the RGB channel is still there but not denoised; the effectResult channel is gone.

Is there a solution to this problem? Bumping the noise threshold down will increase rendering times, and I'd like to keep frame blending and avoid using the rendering engine's built-in denoiser.

Unfortunately I cannot share any animation frames due to NDAs.

[hermit.crab]

This is the current behavior of the vdenoise.exe. I presume the file you want to denoise has lens effects, which you want to keep, correct? You can actually apply lens effects through the standalone denoiser (see how); this way the effectsResult channel will be created after the denoise and lens effects application.

[ryan_companies]

I know this is an older post but does this process still apply for adding lens effects back in after denoising? I followed the link (see how) but I cannot figure out how to save the lens effect from the vfb in max. Any help would be appreciated.

[briareos_kerensky]

In the VFB, enable the Lens Effects channel. Below the "Hardware accelerated" and "Interactive" checkboxes, you'll find "Save Glare channel". It should be checked by default. This will save the glare effects separate from other channels and it will still be there after going through the standalone denoiser. I usually output as EXR, and it works nicely in Photoshop (with plugin) and After Effects.
[edit] This works with V-Ray 6. I don't really remember when the "Save Glare channel" option was added.