ok… - I realized that already the compression used to create the above linked video file eleminated some of the noise present in very dark areas of the RAW footage to a certain extent.
So, here’s another try, which should show the noise and the horizontal banding slightly better (I have replaced the link above also with the higher bitrate version).
Now, I ran this footage through one of my degraining scripts for a quick and dirty test. And indeed, I have trouble to notice any noise or banding in the result.
So, point 3. above, “employ noise reduction”, seems to me to be an integral component of the single RAW capturing approach. Given, one operates just at the verge of a cliff (sensor noise creeping into the image), but I think the approach is usable - with only a single RAW capture.
[Note: this is really a quick-and-dirty test - the degraining script normally expects pre-stabilized imagery (which I did not bother to use) and a certain minimum image size (>2k) (which I undercut with this footage). Nevertheless, I think in a real test with the full processing pipeline, the results will be similar.]
Here are two screen grabs out of the above linked videos. First the version with slight noise/banding:
and here the same frame, degrained
for direct comparision.