NEAT VIDEO - only 8bit?

[Christoffer Glans]

I've tried using NEAT VIDEO on some clips and it seems that every time I get really bad result on gradients. Like in these images where the background and everything looks even comressed. What is going on here? I've tried to change settings in NEAT VIDEO (OFX for Resolve) and I cannot find any that fixes this. The debayer and everything is at full and I graded before putting on the NEAT VIDEO (Same result the other way around though) and did so on a DNxHR444 Cached image. All non-NR images look fantastic :undecided:

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I've used Neat a couple of times on other people's rigs and it seemed to have the desired effect. That said, I've never run it in a trusted 10 bit signal chain to a proper monitor in a proper viewing environment, so maybe the banding is not discernible due to dithering/panel electronics/etc.

Cheers - #19

 

[Saumene Mehrdady]

This used to happen to me all the time, you have to make sure your clips are 10bit or higher, and make sure your NLE (or resolve or whatever) knows that. Neatvideo doesn't play nice with 8bit files

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Thanks Saumene, that sounds like exactly what bit Christoffer.

Cheers - #19

 

[Christoffer Glans]

This used to happen to me all the time, you have to make sure your clips are 10bit or higher, and make sure your NLE (or resolve or whatever) knows that. Neatvideo doesn't play nice with 8bit files

The clips are R3D raw files in a 10 bit 1080p project in Resolve using Neat Video OFX plugin at the end of the node grade for each clip. Looking at the video monitor, it looks good (probably why I didn't spot it in the first place), but I rendered out to a 16bit TIFF sequence and imported that sequence into Avid using the 1:1 10bit codec (uncompressed 10bit). So why would it show up there as on the images? I'm using 10bit all the way from R3Ds to finished online, all in highest quality or uncompressed. That's why it doesn't make sense

 

[ericyoung]

Don't know about Resolve, but I believe I read somewhere on some programmes there are menu options to select whether the processing is floating point or not, or 10bit or 8bit. Just a guess, off the top of my head with no research! :smile:

Edit: Like here:
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?115033-Neat-Video-for-Noise-Reduction/page2

And isn't there an output rendering option for bit depth on Neat Video too?

 

[Nick Fury]

Hi Christoffer!

Some NEAT VIDEO plug-ins are 98-bit only, other ones support 16-bit and/or 32 bit precision. Such high bit depth rendering is supported by NEAT VIDEO in After Effects, Premiere Pro, FCP, Motion, AVX hosts, Vegas Pro.

As regards frame size - there is no artificial limit in the Pro Plugins. The practical limit is usually determined by the amount of availablle memory only.
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Thank you very much

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[Björn Benckert]

Dnx 444 is compressed, no?
If your footage is dipped into that compression and had a lot of noise then it could be so thay when you remove that noise the compression artifact will become more apperant. Also ofcourse noisy r3ds get get more banding issues due to the r3d compression.
and the r3d compression together with dnx compression might enhance the issue.

but if you go straight from r3d trough a floatingpoint node tree to 10 bit dpx then it should be fine. if the source was not complete crap.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Hi Christoffer!

Some NEAT VIDEO plug-ins are 98-bit only, other ones support 16-bit and/or 32 bit precision. Such high bit depth rendering is supported by NEAT VIDEO in After Effects, Premiere Pro, FCP, Motion, AVX hosts, Vegas Pro.

As regards frame size - there is no artificial limit in the Pro Plugins. The practical limit is usually determined by the amount of availablle memory only.
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Thank you very much

Fury[/FONT][FONT=arial, sans-serif]
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So what you are saying is that the more expensive OFX plugin I bought for Resolve won't support 16 or 32bit precision? Then why does it say 32bit when opening up the interface?

Dnx 444 is compressed, no?
If your footage is dipped into that compression and had a lot of noise then it could be so thay when you remove that noise the compression artifact will become more apperant. Also ofcourse noisy r3ds get get more banding issues due to the r3d compression.
and the r3d compression together with dnx compression might enhance the issue.

but if you go straight from r3d trough a floatingpoint node tree to 10 bit dpx then it should be fine. if the source was not complete crap.

Makes sense, but it's not really compression per say, but more that because I work in 32bit float and all files are 10-16bit as well as the output, the banding of gradients should not occur as much as they do. When I look at my monitor out from Resolve, the image looks much better than when I'm rendering out to whatever format. I mean, if it looks good within Resolve and I render out with force full quality debayer, force high quality scaling and everything set to highest quality, to a format that is 10bit or more, close to uncompressed like DNxHR444... should the end result be such a leap towords a high banding low quality image? It's not there on the non-NR images so I think it must have to do with how Resolve and Neat Video works together in the final render.



Also, I cannot see any changes in the amount of NR when changing it within the Neat Video interface. Even if I set it to 15% where in the interface it shows slight noise, it will be super clean when going back to Resolve (super clean as in no noise at all). Sometimes I just want to do slight NR, not removing every life there is in an image.

 

[luigivaltulini]

Christoffer,
I can not play anything of this in my Davinci workstation . Even movies with low light.
You can make a 1 frame r3d of your movie, export your project DaVinci (use Export project .DRP) and share?
So I try to understand what happens.

 

[Björn Benckert]

"close to uncompressed like DNxHR444" A denoised gradient dipping in similar to this stuff ( I dont use DNx or Proress much for that reason) can turn things uggly. What you could do to see if it helps is to add a new grain after the neat video. to didder the image enough for the codec not t bite on that gradient ladder.

If it´s not that then I dont know what it is.

Degrained and blured imagery is what bands first. A very subtle regrain after that can keep things from falling apart. The bit depth helps but even with 16 bit float denoise on compressed material is a bad thing and r3d´s are compressed so one could say that the banding is in the source but you dont see it until it goes through the signal chain. And from looking at your pix it seams like you kind of shot in the dark / showing the sensor floor, when thats done lowest possible compression is a good thing, but then still the camera has difficult to pack all that noise into the r3d. It simply can not fit all the info without tossing part of it way.

 

[Robino_J]

Like Björn said. Your solution is to dither. Add 0.4 of noise and see your banding disappear. I would not add grain plates since they are pre-generated. Use a real basic noise plugin.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Christoffer,
I can not play anything of this in my Davinci workstation . Even movies with low light.
You can make a 1 frame r3d of your movie, export your project DaVinci (use Export project .DRP) and share?
So I try to understand what happens.

I will see what I can do, but you'll need the OFX Neat Video and Davinci 12.

"close to uncompressed like DNxHR444" A denoised gradient dipping in similar to this stuff ( I dont use DNx or Proress much for that reason) can turn things uggly. What you could do to see if it helps is to add a new grain after the neat video. to didder the image enough for the codec not t bite on that gradient ladder.

If it´s not that then I dont know what it is.

Degrained and blured imagery is what bands first. A very subtle regrain after that can keep things from falling apart. The bit depth helps but even with 16 bit float denoise on compressed material is a bad thing and r3d´s are compressed so one could say that the banding is in the source but you dont see it until it goes through the signal chain. And from looking at your pix it seams like you kind of shot in the dark / showing the sensor floor, when thats done lowest possible compression is a good thing, but then still the camera has difficult to pack all that noise into the r3d. It simply can not fit all the info without tossing part of it way.

Thing is that the result is there even when I do not cache nodes, when I use 16bit R3Ds directly and at full premium. Is it that because I shot this at 5:1 compression ratio, the noise isn't hiding compression artifacts? If we were able to shoot an entirely noiseless image with the Dragon sensor on a gradient surface, would that pick up compression banding?

Like Björn said. Your solution is to dither. Add 0.4 of noise and see your banding disappear. I would not add grain plates since they are pre-generated. Use a real basic noise plugin.

I actually just wanted to reduce a small amount of noise with Neat Video, problem for me it seems that Neat Video doesn't work properly when I'm setting the value for noise removal, it just reduce everything at maximum. If I could just slightly remove the noise I would still have some left.


But nothing of this makes any sense since I cannot see the awful banding on my output monitor, only the final renders out of DaVinci. I'm gonna see if I can get an example out of resolve for this. Rendering a final grade that looks good in DaVinci, into a DNxHR444 format shouldn't produce this as no post is done on that render, that's the final render of the grade that is based on the uncompressed sources or R3D.

 

[AndreasOberg]

I have only worked with Neat Video in After effects and then I got really good results in 16 bits per color channel.
I also found that it could take away compression artifacts nicely and also reduce banding. I found that I could put in an 8 bit source and add colors than was in the source, worked especially nice on skies.

Would be nice to plug into Davinci, but haven't tried that yet.

Cheers
/Andreas

 

[John Sellars]

Here is a 2K 16bit gradient that I find useful to check bit depth issues:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3911894/Gradient-16bit.tif

Tip: In Resolve scopes/Waveform, play with turning on and off individual RGB channels.