Red Giant Denoiser, Neat video or....?

[Nick Fury]

Hi Matt!

As we discussed, I have ben working on a GB, for the upgrade., to reprise the success of last year's NEAT Video GB. Not sure yet Though. I know the cost to upgrade is not very high, but maybe something can be structured to accommodate upgrade pathway owners and novitiates.

Stay Tuned.

Thank you very much

Fury

 

[David Battistella]

Upgrade from 3 to 4 is 49$

 

[Christoffer Glans]

With Neat sometimes its challenging to find the "no detail" control area for the algo to baseline off of. Any tips on this?

You could shoot something under similar circumstances, i.e same camera temperature, shooting settings and so on. Shoot something flat at dark/low midtones and you can use that as a reference.
But I only recommended it if you can't find a uniform noise in the real footage.

 

[Matt Ryan]

You could shoot something under similar circumstances, i.e same camera temperature, shooting settings and so on. Shoot something flat at dark/low midtones and you can use that as a reference.
But I only recommended it if you can't find a uniform noise in the real footage.

Exactly, I created a bunch of presets for Dragon footage and different ISO values. So I have a Skintone 800ISO preset, Skintone 500ISO Preset, Skintone High Frame rate compression preset, Skintone 4K 120fps preset, and the same for Low Light. Makes it easy to apply NR and know the results I can get ahead of time. Then I can always refine the correction but this way I have a quick starting point that I know is effective.

 

[Filip Orlandic]

Clarity is probably the best noise/compression fixing tool.
It's very similar to A.D.D. but much faster

 

[Johnny Friday]

NEAT VIDEO:

I've had this plugin for many years. I've had no success with 4k to 6k footage though when workign in fcp & x. Or i mean to say working with original R3d footage. Works fine when transcoded....but i've not tried in about 6 months. Has anything changed? It would always drop frames and leave a blank/black frame when trying to denoise R3d footage.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

NEAT VIDEO:

I've had this plugin for many years. I've had no success with 4k to 6k footage though when workign in fcp & x. Or i mean to say working with original R3d footage. Works fine when transcoded....but i've not tried in about 6 months. Has anything changed? It would always drop frames and leave a blank/black frame when trying to denoise R3d footage.

Sounds more like your hardware isn't up for it combined with FCP not handling it well. I've had no problems like that with the OFX in Resolve. Also, do you have version 4?

 

[Matt Ryan]

NEAT VIDEO:

I've had this plugin for many years. I've had no success with 4k to 6k footage though when workign in fcp & x. Or i mean to say working with original R3d footage. Works fine when transcoded....but i've not tried in about 6 months. Has anything changed? It would always drop frames and leave a blank/black frame when trying to denoise R3d footage.

Been using it on 4K+ R3D's for several years in Premiere and Resolve without any issues. Never had a dropped or black frame.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Do not think that all the guys going against the grain here are lacking knowledge.

"Against the grain!" That's a great play on words.

I think Nucoda, Neat Video, and the Resolve DNR/TNR combo all have pros and cons. My solution for Björn is to note that there's always a price to pay with noise reduction, particularly a loss of detail. People have to learn how to read histograms more carefully while shooting. And I think it's dicey once you go north of 1200 ISO.

 

[David Battistella]

Been using it on 4K+ R3D's for several years in Premiere and Resolve without any issues. Never had a dropped or black frame.

+1 on this. Never had an issue.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

"Against the grain!" That's a great play on words.

I think Nucoda, Neat Video, and the Resolve DNR/TNR combo all have pros and cons. My solution for Björn is to note that there's always a price to pay with noise reduction, particularly a loss of detail. People have to learn how to read histograms more carefully while shooting. And I think it's dicey once you go north of 1200 ISO.

Of course, but then there's the fact that humans aren't machines and that makes for the possibility of idiots so much higher than mechanical errors. It's also a fact that you can make money of these idiots by giving them solutions to their problems and that's where neat video comes in hand. It's also unwise to just be a smartass to a client with this kind of problem by saying that they should have done it right from the get go.

But other than that, I've seen a lot of details reduced by heavy noise reduction but still look better than trying to cope with the noise. People do not notice artifacts from noise reduction as much as you might think. Another example of extreme artifacts is the warping of contours when applying something like a timewarp on a clip. I've seen mega expensive shows which used some of these effects, but only because I used the material in some trailer I edited and looked very closely at each shot.

In an edit, people loose track of artifacts if you don't linger too long on those shots. At the end of the day, most work will always be on a silver lining to have the most invisible problems possible. So creating some "invisible" problems by reducing the visible ones is the best you can do. I view it as just that, reducing problems to a point where they don't refocus the emotional flow of the video to viewer experience. As long as the viewer is emotionally invested in something they won't notice problems within the frame. In that sense, a movie or a short video is technically a magic trick more than it just being an abstract terminology for filmmaking.

 

[Björn Benckert]

"Against the grain!" That's a great play on words.

I think Nucoda, Neat Video, and the Resolve DNR/TNR combo all have pros and cons. My solution for Björn is to note that there's always a price to pay with noise reduction, particularly a loss of detail. People have to learn how to read histograms more carefully while shooting. And I think it's dicey once you go north of 1200 ISO.

Can only agree. I hate noise reduction and I think any way possible to not need it is worth striving for. In this case I was not at set and I had no idea what they where going to shoot. If I would have known I would have made sure things where done differently. But in this case I only got a hard drive delivered with material and where asked to "save it". And I´m sure they will do it differently, as when things still looks dark when the iso is brought up to 12000ISO then exposure is... quite far from ideal if you look for clean image.

 

[Luis de la Cerda]

Neat Video 4 is unbelievable.

To properly calibrate Neat Video you need to shoot this calibration target...

http://www.neatimage.com/im/target/NICalibrationTarget1600color.png

...using the same camera that shot the material you want to denoise and rated at the same iso.

Try different exposure levels and use them all to build up your profile.

Once you have a good profile in the high 90's, try combining low spatial denoising and high temporal denoising.
This combination preserves the most detail possible, although it doesn't work for high motion footage.
YMMV

Cheers.