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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Is it better to apply NeatVideo from within AE or Premiere?

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Les C.

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Is it better to apply NeatVideo from within AE or Premiere?

Assuming that the footage is being edited in Premiere, but many effects applied in AE?
 
It depends, but generally as near to the end of your workflow as possible, but BEFORE any compression/rescaling would be a good rule of thumb IMO.
 
ericyoung said:
It depends, but generally as near to the end of your workflow as possible, but BEFORE any compression/rescaling would be a good rule of thumb IMO.
Click to expand...

What's the reasoning behind applying it at the end rather than the very first operation?
 
doesn't matter when you do it les. run speed tests.

do make sure it's in the chain before blurs (including compression)... obviously.
 
BTW - I encouraged NeatVideo's developer to have a presence on this forum and he seems interested.

Possibly there are certain enhancements that could be made specifically for R3D files?
 
paulherrin said:
doesn't matter when you do it les. run speed tests.

do make sure it's in the chain before blurs (including compression)... obviously.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can do it anywhere in the chain, but the reasoning to do it at the end is that noise reduction always loses some picture information. If you doing other picture processing such as grading, scaling, sharpening etc, it makes sense to do them all at the end when you have a fairly final edit so you have a good idea what else you will be doing to the picture, as all such processing has artifacts which have combined effects. Also you may want to do different amounts of denoising depending on the intended deliverable. Plus you aren't spending time and effort processing redundant footage you aren't going to be using in the final edit.
 
Just to clarify where NR would be in the processing chain. It's fine at the end of the edit chain but only on the basis you are processing camera originals, i.e. so no signal processing has been applied before hand i.e. down conversion, colour grading and so on. You need as much data as you can to give it best results.

There are some arguments to apply it else where in the colour processing chain depending on you needs, could be for applying NR to green screen camera originals for instance in which case the order in which you apply your grading tools and NR may change, best check with a colourist for specific set ups.

Graeme Nattress or Mike Most hopefully might correct me or tell you more.
 
My ?thinking? was that applying NR as the very first node would ensure that any processing is working on the image, not processing 'noise' - with unwanted effects.

The filter can be turned off for editing (due to speed constraints), but would be turned on for any grading.

AE's caching might be very useful for this, to speed things up.

So, I'd guess that you would edit in Premiere, and then do all grading, effects, etc. in AE?

I wish Resolve had OFX plug-in capability (I've got NeatVideo on OFX for Eyeon's Fusion, which has supported RED color/gamma 3 for since March) - as I don't want to apply NR as the last stage - and I really like Resolve's node workflow.

Then again, Fusion may be coming out with AE/Premiere support - and that would be an ideal app to grade in.

But, then ... maybe my ?thinking? is off-base, and in real-world tests, where NR is applied won't make any difference at all?

Have to do some testing!
 
Les C. said:
My ?thinking? was that applying NR as the very first node would ensure that any processing is working on the image, not processing 'noise' - with unwanted effects.

I wish Resolve had OFX plug-in capability (I've got NeatVideo on OFX for Eyeon's Fusion, which has supported RED color/gamma 3 for since March) - as I don't want to apply NR as the last stage - and I really like Resolve's node workflow.
Click to expand...

I agree Resolve would be even better with Pulg in support, I wish speed grade had it too.
 
paulherrin said:
doesn't matter when you do it les. run speed tests.

do make sure it's in the chain before blurs (including compression)... obviously.
Click to expand...

It does matter - you want to do it with the raw files and at full res - not after downscaled. Also if you have secondaries first this can throw off the regularity fo the noise and Neat Video will not do as good a job
 
I agree with some of the earlier posters; bugger Premiere or AE, I'd like to see what happens with Neat in *RCX*: clean up any noise issues right at the start of chain, supply clean noise-free material to the rest of the post operation.

Of course in theory properly-exposed footage should be noise free from the camera and shouldn't NEED Neat... but we all know what 'theory' did!

Mike
 
I contacted Neat Video and this was their response:

Yes, our users often ask about the best place for noise
reduction in a chain of filters and usually I recommend to use
Neat Video in the beginning, before the noise is aggravated by
other post-processing that could make it more difficult to
reduce. Not that Neat Video would not work in the end of
dataflow, but using it in the beginning may produce somewhat
better results.

Also, specifically in AE, NV must go first in the stack of
effects, because of certain limitations of the host itself (they
are related to the temporal processing done by Neat Video and
support for such processing by the host application).
In Premiere, NV can work in any position.

Otherwise, the choice of using NV in AE or in Premiere depends
mostly on your workflow and preference.

Hope this helps,
 
David Baumber said:
I contacted Neat Video and this was their response:

Yes, our users often ask about the best place for noise
reduction in a chain of filters and usually I recommend to use
Neat Video in the beginning, before the noise is aggravated by
other post-processing that could make it more difficult to
reduce. Not that Neat Video would not work in the end of
dataflow, but using it in the beginning may produce somewhat
better results.

Also, specifically in AE, NV must go first in the stack of
effects, because of certain limitations of the host itself (they
are related to the temporal processing done by Neat Video and
support for such processing by the host application).
In Premiere, NV can work in any position.

Otherwise, the choice of using NV in AE or in Premiere depends
mostly on your workflow and preference.

Hope this helps,
Click to expand...
Yes, that was my assumption.

This REALLY points out the need for OFX or AE plug-in support for Resolve & SpeedGrade.

At the moment, if you want to grade 'correctly' (or, at least with the least noise - assuming NeatVideo is better than Resolve's NR), Eyeon's Fusion (which happily has supported RED gamma/color 3 since March), may be the only solution.
 
I've always used NeatVideo at the beginning of the process. It will save you time since you can usually just do one pass of neatvideo over your entire project and get good results, only having to spot check really high ISO shots.

This saves time, rather than trying to do it after the color correction, since you will have to create a noise profile for each clip after it's been messed with.

The great part is with the "send to Speedgrade" function, you can bake all of this into a DPX if that is your workflow, so I would put my vote on Premiere.
 
Alexander Mejia said:
The great part is with the "send to Speedgrade" function, you can bake all of this into a DPX if that is your workflow, so I would put my vote on Premiere.
Click to expand...

To get the maximum grading flexibility and quality, you want to use R3D's, not DPX.

It's a real shortcoming of SpeedGrade and Resolve, that you can't use NeatVideo first and still use native R3D's.

If you want to use those programs, you might want to consider using R3D's, and then use NeatVideo on the rendered output.

I've seen quite good results using this method by https://vimeo.com/presynkt (who also has some great Resolve workflow tutorials on that Vimeo channel).

Certainly not ideal (he's outputting at 2K instead of 4K using the free version of Resolve, then using NeatVideo on the 2K, or at least he was a few months ago), but ... the results look very good and professional.
 
Les C. said:
To get the maximum grading flexibility and quality, you want to use R3D's, not DPX.

It's a real shortcoming of SpeedGrade and Resolve, that you can't use NeatVideo first and still use native R3D's.

If you want to use those programs, you might want to consider using R3D's, and then use NeatVideo on the rendered output.

I've seen quite good results using this method by https://vimeo.com/presynkt (who also has some great Resolve workflow tutorials on that Vimeo channel).

Certainly not ideal (he's outputting at 2K instead of 4K using the free version of Resolve, then using NeatVideo on the 2K, or at least he was a few months ago), but ... the results look very good and professional.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure I agree with that wholly. While it'd be nice to use temporal noise reduction like Neat Video in a finishing app, I'd much prefer to compromise by bringing in DPX files in comparison to running noise reduction on footage that has already been graded and resized. If anything, by down sizing, you're blending high frequency noise to the point it becomes mid frequency, and that's a bit more difficult to remove without chomping on some image detail; you also end up with smaller sample areas.

I'm a proponent of using noise reduction as early in the finishing pipeline as possible. You get cleaner greenscreen keys (RED cameras seem to give off a lot of noise in the blue/yellow which can dirty a greenscreen), you clean the image so grain can be added in after composited VFX elements, and you can reduce banding if you perform noise reduction with high precision (16bit+).

Something that has been gaining ground is the use of OpenEXR sequences in ACES color for ultimate color flexibility. I haven't looked at the ins-and-outs but some members of the ASC seem to love it.
 
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