Neat video vs Davinci anti-noise filter (or others)

O

orange

Active member
Hello, I am working in Final Cut Pro and have some scenes with heavy digital noise.
My colorist is using Davinci and is trying to remove noise using Davinci's own noise filter.
I think the results are very moderate.
I am now looking at a trial of Neat Video's filter and it looks better at a first look but I am not still convinced if it's worth the USD 100.
Has anyone tried both (or any other filter you recommend) and can tell of your experience?
 
Neat Video has been an industry-standard for probably over a decade now. It will remove any and all noise but can easily turn the images into plastic as a result. (You have to find a compromise.)

I haven't used Resolve's option, but NV is well worth the price.
 
+1 on NorBro's suggestion. Neat Video has been my go to noise reduction on historical doco archive footage for years. It's highly configurable and has many tweaking options you can adjust until you are happy with the results. Worth the $$$s. To get the best out of it you need a reasonably powerful platform as it is a bit of CPU intensive piece of software.

Chris Young
 
Ok, thanks for your input folks. I have a follow-up question here. I'd like to use the Neat video denoise filter in Final Cut, should I denoise before I send the clips to color grading, or is it better if I receive them from grading and then denoise, or doesn't it matter? I know the best would have been for my colorist to have the plug-in filter in Davinci, but that filter is much more expensive than the FCP version...
 
In Premiere Pro, I'd denoise to see the result, then turn it off until final render (it's super slow, even with a 10(+)-Core CPU + powerful GPU (Neat uses both: be sure to run the optimizer to find the fastest setting)). For best results you want to denoise per clip and fine tune settings. Also, you're best off leaving some noise for grain, and also important to do tests where you export to H.264 and upload to YouTube/Vimeo or wherever your content will be viewed to see the final result (you can also export to ProRes, etc., however the final online content will be H.264 (or similar) and highly compressed).

Having the colorist work with the noisy footage will give you the most flexibility for the final render. However, if the noise is really bad, e.g. with medium and low frequency giant splotches, it could effect the colorist's work, in which case you could denoise and render before given them the footage. Perhaps do a few tests to see which way works best for the project.
 
orange said:
Ok, thanks for your input folks. I have a follow-up question here. I'd like to use the Neat video denoise filter in Final Cut, should I denoise before I send the clips to color grading, or is it better if I receive them from grading and then denoise, or doesn't it matter?
Click to expand...

I asked this question years back of Neat Video and they suggested to do the noise reduction first then ther grade. Following their suggestions I do the noise redux first then turn it off and do the grade and then turn it back on for the render. Neat is a resource hog for sure as JCS indicated.

Chris Young
 
A side thought.

NR is just blurring and saturation control?

I dont generally bother with a noise reduction pugin.

If I have noisy in the shadows I could blur and reduce saturation in resolve.

Doing this on a node allows you to qualify the region you hit, which I mainly do by a luma qualification

aka desaturat and blur the shadows and you are golden, you can add mild grain back in later :)
 
morgan_moore said:
A side thought.

NR is just blurring and saturation control?
Click to expand...

Neat Video, Dark Energy and similar are much more sophisticated. A good NR reduction process removes random pixels and preserves information, especially real detail, texture, and edges. Neat Video looks for randomly varying pixels in both space and time (temporal is optional and more expensive to compute) and fills in the noisy pixels with estimations from nearby real pixels. This happens in (at least) four frequency domains, very low, low, medium, and high frequency (very low is on/off, the rest are tunable).

When using the 5D3 and GH4, noise reduction was frequently required. Since using the Sony A7S I & II (now sold) and using the Canon 80D (a bit noisy in low light but not requiring NR so far), 1DX II and C300 II (both really usable in low light), I haven't need to use NR. Another factor of course is always shooting with good light, even when the final edit will be dark: best to shoot well lit and pull down in post vs. shooting in low light due to noise issues.

Neat Video is useful to have in the toolkit 'just in case', since it can convert unusable shots into usable ones.
 
I use both DaVinci NR and Neat Video paid version, for me personally the two don't compare. Neat Video is really good, so good that I usually have to key it out 50% or overlay noise back on top of the footage so it matches other scenes around it incase I'm only doing NR on one or two shots.

The other times I'll resort to DaVinci NR is for example when the footage doesn't need major surgery, and/or we don't have a lot of extra time for rendering. Neat Video runs a lot slower, also unless you have a lot of video memory you can easily crash DaVinci using Neat Video on 4K or higher footage.

So, I use both, it all depends but I would say Neat Video does a way better job for when it's needed.
 
MM

Neat Video allows you to sample the areas where you want to reduce noise. If you sample a noisy dark area the NR is optimized for those levels and frequencies. Every time I use Neat I am surprised at how it maintains sharpness. Neat is far more sophisticated than just blurring. Check these out on how to build a good noise profile. After spending some time experimenting and following various Neat tutorials over the years I have had good success with it. These tutorials relate to the current v4 Neat Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0EY_hDDbqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfK82CPuSRU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlwIqqzkRok

Chris Young
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top