Neat Video and Quad Processors at DVinfo.net

Scott Brickert · May 28th, 2008, 10:59 PM

What experiences have y'all had with Neat Video render times and multiple processors? I recently ran into 19hour render times on an 88minute timeline, most of which had Neat Video applied at the track level (Event Level application resulted in crashes).

I'm running a CoreDuo 3.2GHz with 3.25GB of ram. If i went to a quad at 3.2GHz, would i cut the render time in ??half??

Graham Bernard · May 29th, 2008, 12:49 AM

Check to make sure you have disabled the "Temporal filter" adjustment. You do this by using the slider and pushing this way over to the left. What you should get is a notification that the TF has been shutdown by the word "disabled" appearing at the far RIGHT of the slider. Try this out on a small section and come back here with your results. If you had already done this, then dunno .. but read on . .

Just as an aside, yes we can add FXs tat track level, but this will mean ALL events get the Fx, and this will slow down a render. Added to which if you ALSO have FXs at Event level too then the NEat video will also need to process this in order too! Planning for rendering is what I do now.

Also get onto the NeatVideo forum and read up on the use of NV within Vegas.

HTH

Grazie

Paul Kellett · May 29th, 2008, 03:16 AM

What's NEAT Video ?

Paul.

Graham Bernard · May 29th, 2008, 03:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

What's NEAT Video ?

Amazing! That's what it is . .

http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

Grazie

Paul Kellett · May 29th, 2008, 03:54 AM

Graham.
That does look pretty good.
Does it do exactly as it says ?
And how much was the program ? I can only find dollar prices ?
Thanks.

Paul.

George Kroonder · May 29th, 2008, 06:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

And how much was the program ? I can only find dollar prices ?

Euro pricing is right there on the line below US$. You can choose any currency on the SWREG site incl. GBP 53.39 for the Pro version.

George/

John Cline · May 29th, 2008, 07:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

Graham.
Does it do exactly as it says ?

NeatVideo is pretty darned close to "miracle" software. Along with "Izotope RX" for audio cleanup, the combination of the two is amazing.

Scott Brickert · May 29th, 2008, 09:18 AM

Here's an anwer to the question from the NV forum:

>PostPosted: Thu May 29, 2008 5:04 am Post subject: Reply with quote
>If a Core2Duo at 3.26 GHz would get it done in 12-15 hours, would a QuadCore at >3.2GHz get done in 6-8 hours?

>PostPosted: Thu May 29, 2008 5:19 am Post subject: Reply with quote
>Well, the speedup in this case would be about x1.5-1.7. In any case, 4 cores are >better than 2, NV can use more cores to do more work at the same time.

>Vlad
_________________
>Neat Video team
>noise reduction for video: www.neatvideo.com | noise reduction for images: >www.neatimage.com

Neat Video creates great looks, but can take super long to render. As stated in the original post, 19hours for an 88minute timeline. And that was after multiple tries at 30+ hours.

The main fix was removing Neat Video from the individual events and placing it at the Track level, per Vlad's recommendation.

Here are some numbers for rendering 1:00 minute of HDV to MPEG2 DVDA Widescreen template [on a CoreDuo@ 3.2GHz, 3.25GB ram, XP Pro]:

--no FX=> 1:37
--Smart Smoother (4/40)=>4:47
--Smart Smoother (7/65)=>6:58
--Smart Smoother (8/75)=>7:28
--Neat Video v2.2 radius of 1=>16:10
--Neat Video v2.2 radius of 0=>12:04

I guess if I had a Q6600 running at 3.2GHz I could hope for around 7:30.

Smart Smoother approaches the look of Neat Video, but it does more smearing, whereas Neat Video appears to wrap the look around objects in the image.

Maybe I'll buy a Q6600...

Ian Stark · May 29th, 2008, 10:55 AM

Just curious, Scott - what kind of footage was it that needs noise reduction on all 88 minutes? I'm guessing some kind of indoor event in low light?

Scott Brickert · May 29th, 2008, 06:31 PM

Yeah, it was a 50th b-day party. The directive was "unobtrusive" so I shot it with two HV20's, allowing no gain control for the low light. I used NV on all but the first 4 minutes of intro, as much for the look as for grain reduction--kinda smoothed out the crow's feet for the 50 and overs:). It looks great in HDV, not as good in NTSC Widescreen, but better than without, and better than Smart Smoother.

Ian Stark · May 30th, 2008, 02:41 AM

I'm not personally an event shooter so my comments may be wide of the mark but I had a similar situation last year when I was shooting some speaker interviews during a conference. The organisers asked if I would be willing to hang around and shoot a few minutes of their evening get-together in return for a meal, all the booze we could handle and a room for the night. As we were already staying in town and had planned to eat and drink that night it kinda made sense!

Anyway, to cut to the chase . . . we shot on two Canon XL2 cameras without additional light. When we arrived, the room was bright and cheerful. Of course at the point we were asked to start shooting they turned the lights down! Typical. My camera was set to (as far as I recall) 6dB gain but my colleague (normally my audio recordist and not especially camera savvy) had his set to 0dB. (Stupidly I didn't check this).

Back in the edit suite and I realised that noise reduction was necessary on both sets of footage. Interestingly I got FAR better results on the footage that had the gain cranked up than the 0dB footage, using just presets. It was sharper all round and just kinda worked, allowing me a wider choice of further image processing on the clean footage. Almost no discernible clues that NR had been applied. On the darker footage I couldn't get beyond that mushy, airbrushed look, even with a lot of tweaking (in the end I desaturated it, applied a load of deliberate grain and a blue wash and called it an artistic choice - client loved it!).

I should point out that this was on an older version of Neat and it was the After Effects version, as I don't own the Vegas version. I'm guessing that the same results would apply though.

So, may be worth doing some tests with and without gain. Of course, that would very likely return those wrinkles to the 50+'s!!

Sherif Choudhry · May 31st, 2008, 07:40 AM

I had shot a school play on a Digital 8 in awful light - footage was very very noisey, so this thread prompted me to buy neatvideo.

I was pleased - it turns the noisey bits into a smooth, soft tone. I liked the sharpening which worked better than Vegas unsharp mask filter.

Of course what it wont do is hide the fact that i shot in low-light with poor stage lights.

My 2.4ghz quad core 2gb ram took 4 hours to render 30 minutes of footage (with 2 colour corrector filters). Each of the 4 cores was 75% utilised.

Recommended.

Ian Stark · June 3rd, 2008, 04:03 PM

Well, after all this discussion I just bought Neat Video for Vegas. I have used it before in After Effects and to a lesser extent in Vegas but this is the first time I have had a chance to really put the Vegas version to the test in a production environment.

It's easy to say 'get it right in the camera' but there are occasions when even though you think you've got it right, you haven't.

I recently directed and am currently editing a promo for an an education organisation. We used a Canon XL2 with a 35mm adapter. Beautiful shallow depth of field, yes, but at the expense of a good stop/stop and a half exposure. We spent a lot of time lighting the shots and it looked fine when we were monitoring but in post when I came to play with the footage it started to expose some noise in a number of important shots. Initially I just dialled down the filters that were bringing the noise to the fore but I thought I would give Neat a go so as not to have to make that compromise.

Right out of the box, using presets only, I was able to correct the noise 100% in almost every shot and create a lovely smooth feel to the footage - not soft, smooth. I am extremely happy and have now been able to return the creative adjustments to the footage that I originally wanted.

Aside from helping me rescue these clips what I am really excited about is the fact that I can use the filter for creative purposes to build new looks. I'm looking forward to spending some time getting to know the individual settings.

Performance wise I am seeing 70% utilisation across all four cores in a quadcore 2.67GHz with 2gb RAM. Difficult to judge render times though as I am rendering a 17m 45s project with 3 video tracks, 3 audio tracks (with Ozone on all), numerous generated media tracks and countless event level instances of MB Looks, Color Curves, Levels and envelopes galore. I'm looking at around 2hrs 20mins which I am quite happy with.

I'm delighted I made the modest investment in Neat Video and very impressed with Vlad, the guy at Absoft, who processed my order even though he is on holiday.

Highly recommended.

Ian . . .

Sherif Choudhry · June 4th, 2008, 05:02 PM

Ian, you are seeing much faster render times than i, and it cant be accounted for just by the faster processor, can it?? Are you using a raid disk array?

Ian Stark · June 4th, 2008, 05:11 PM

Hi Sherif,

I'm going to have to say that I think it IS only the processor. I don't have RAID, only have 2Gb RAM, regular 7200 rpm data drives in desperate need of defragging (fast Raptor system drive though). I guess the other thing to take into account is the settings I'm using - so far I have only used the preset 'remove all noise' and haven't done any tweaking at all.

What's your processor, out of interest?

Ian . . .

ps sorry but I have an early start in the morning so I'm going to bed now!

May 28th, 2008, 10:59 PM	#1
Scott Brickert Major Player Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Crested Butte, CO Posts: 576	Neat Video and Quad Processors What experiences have y'all had with Neat Video render times and multiple processors? I recently ran into 19hour render times on an 88minute timeline, most of which had Neat Video applied at the track level (Event Level application resulted in crashes). I'm running a CoreDuo 3.2GHz with 3.25GB of ram. If i went to a quad at 3.2GHz, would i cut the render time in ??half?? __________________ Scott Shot-By-Scott

May 29th, 2008, 03:16 AM	#3
Paul Kellett Trustee Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Bristol UK Posts: 1,273	What's NEAT Video ? Paul. __________________ Round 2 GH5,FZ2000

May 29th, 2008, 03:54 AM	#5
Paul Kellett Trustee Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Bristol UK Posts: 1,273	Graham. That does look pretty good. Does it do exactly as it says ? And how much was the program ? I can only find dollar prices ? Thanks. Paul. __________________ Round 2 GH5,FZ2000

May 29th, 2008, 09:18 AM	#8
Scott Brickert Major Player Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Crested Butte, CO Posts: 576	Here's an anwer to the question from the NV forum: >PostPosted: Thu May 29, 2008 5:04 am Post subject: Reply with quote >If a Core2Duo at 3.26 GHz would get it done in 12-15 hours, would a QuadCore at >3.2GHz get done in 6-8 hours? >PostPosted: Thu May 29, 2008 5:19 am Post subject: Reply with quote >Well, the speedup in this case would be about x1.5-1.7. In any case, 4 cores are >better than 2, NV can use more cores to do more work at the same time. >Vlad _________________ >Neat Video team >noise reduction for video: www.neatvideo.com \| noise reduction for images: >www.neatimage.com Neat Video creates great looks, but can take super long to render. As stated in the original post, 19hours for an 88minute timeline. And that was after multiple tries at 30+ hours. The main fix was removing Neat Video from the individual events and placing it at the Track level, per Vlad's recommendation. Here are some numbers for rendering 1:00 minute of HDV to MPEG2 DVDA Widescreen template [on a CoreDuo@ 3.2GHz, 3.25GB ram, XP Pro]: --no FX=> 1:37 --Smart Smoother (4/40)=>4:47 --Smart Smoother (7/65)=>6:58 --Smart Smoother (8/75)=>7:28 --Neat Video v2.2 radius of 1=>16:10 --Neat Video v2.2 radius of 0=>12:04 I guess if I had a Q6600 running at 3.2GHz I could hope for around 7:30. Smart Smoother approaches the look of Neat Video, but it does more smearing, whereas Neat Video appears to wrap the look around objects in the image. Maybe I'll buy a Q6600... __________________ Scott Shot-By-Scott

May 29th, 2008, 10:55 AM	#9
Ian Stark Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 2,237	Just curious, Scott - what kind of footage was it that needs noise reduction on all 88 minutes? I'm guessing some kind of indoor event in low light? __________________ www.vit-media.com www.classicmachinefilms.co.uk

May 29th, 2008, 12:49 AM	#2
Graham Bernard Old Boot Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: London UK Posts: 3,633	Check to make sure you have disabled the "Temporal filter" adjustment. You do this by using the slider and pushing this way over to the left. What you should get is a notification that the TF has been shutdown by the word "disabled" appearing at the far RIGHT of the slider. Try this out on a small section and come back here with your results. If you had already done this, then dunno .. but read on . . Just as an aside, yes we can add FXs tat track level, but this will mean ALL events get the Fx, and this will slow down a render. Added to which if you ALSO have FXs at Event level too then the NEat video will also need to process this in order too! Planning for rendering is what I do now. Also get onto the NeatVideo forum and read up on the use of NV within Vegas. HTH Grazie

May 29th, 2008, 06:31 PM	#10
Scott Brickert Major Player Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Crested Butte, CO Posts: 576	Yeah, it was a 50th b-day party. The directive was "unobtrusive" so I shot it with two HV20's, allowing no gain control for the low light. I used NV on all but the first 4 minutes of intro, as much for the look as for grain reduction--kinda smoothed out the crow's feet for the 50 and overs:). It looks great in HDV, not as good in NTSC Widescreen, but better than without, and better than Smart Smoother. __________________ Scott Shot-By-Scott

May 30th, 2008, 02:41 AM	#11
Ian Stark Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 2,237	I'm not personally an event shooter so my comments may be wide of the mark but I had a similar situation last year when I was shooting some speaker interviews during a conference. The organisers asked if I would be willing to hang around and shoot a few minutes of their evening get-together in return for a meal, all the booze we could handle and a room for the night. As we were already staying in town and had planned to eat and drink that night it kinda made sense! Anyway, to cut to the chase . . . we shot on two Canon XL2 cameras without additional light. When we arrived, the room was bright and cheerful. Of course at the point we were asked to start shooting they turned the lights down! Typical. My camera was set to (as far as I recall) 6dB gain but my colleague (normally my audio recordist and not especially camera savvy) had his set to 0dB. (Stupidly I didn't check this). Back in the edit suite and I realised that noise reduction was necessary on both sets of footage. Interestingly I got FAR better results on the footage that had the gain cranked up than the 0dB footage, using just presets. It was sharper all round and just kinda worked, allowing me a wider choice of further image processing on the clean footage. Almost no discernible clues that NR had been applied. On the darker footage I couldn't get beyond that mushy, airbrushed look, even with a lot of tweaking (in the end I desaturated it, applied a load of deliberate grain and a blue wash and called it an artistic choice - client loved it!). I should point out that this was on an older version of Neat and it was the After Effects version, as I don't own the Vegas version. I'm guessing that the same results would apply though. So, may be worth doing some tests with and without gain. Of course, that would very likely return those wrinkles to the 50+'s!! __________________ www.vit-media.com www.classicmachinefilms.co.uk

May 31st, 2008, 07:40 AM	#12
Sherif Choudhry Major Player Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: London Posts: 222	Neatvideo works!! I had shot a school play on a Digital 8 in awful light - footage was very very noisey, so this thread prompted me to buy neatvideo. I was pleased - it turns the noisey bits into a smooth, soft tone. I liked the sharpening which worked better than Vegas unsharp mask filter. Of course what it wont do is hide the fact that i shot in low-light with poor stage lights. My 2.4ghz quad core 2gb ram took 4 hours to render 30 minutes of footage (with 2 colour corrector filters). Each of the 4 cores was 75% utilised. Recommended.

June 3rd, 2008, 04:03 PM	#13
Ian Stark Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 2,237	Well, after all this discussion I just bought Neat Video for Vegas. I have used it before in After Effects and to a lesser extent in Vegas but this is the first time I have had a chance to really put the Vegas version to the test in a production environment. It's easy to say 'get it right in the camera' but there are occasions when even though you think you've got it right, you haven't. I recently directed and am currently editing a promo for an an education organisation. We used a Canon XL2 with a 35mm adapter. Beautiful shallow depth of field, yes, but at the expense of a good stop/stop and a half exposure. We spent a lot of time lighting the shots and it looked fine when we were monitoring but in post when I came to play with the footage it started to expose some noise in a number of important shots. Initially I just dialled down the filters that were bringing the noise to the fore but I thought I would give Neat a go so as not to have to make that compromise. Right out of the box, using presets only, I was able to correct the noise 100% in almost every shot and create a lovely smooth feel to the footage - not soft, smooth. I am extremely happy and have now been able to return the creative adjustments to the footage that I originally wanted. Aside from helping me rescue these clips what I am really excited about is the fact that I can use the filter for creative purposes to build new looks. I'm looking forward to spending some time getting to know the individual settings. Performance wise I am seeing 70% utilisation across all four cores in a quadcore 2.67GHz with 2gb RAM. Difficult to judge render times though as I am rendering a 17m 45s project with 3 video tracks, 3 audio tracks (with Ozone on all), numerous generated media tracks and countless event level instances of MB Looks, Color Curves, Levels and envelopes galore. I'm looking at around 2hrs 20mins which I am quite happy with. I'm delighted I made the modest investment in Neat Video and very impressed with Vlad, the guy at Absoft, who processed my order even though he is on holiday. Highly recommended. Ian . . . __________________ www.vit-media.com www.classicmachinefilms.co.uk

June 4th, 2008, 05:02 PM	#14
Sherif Choudhry Major Player Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: London Posts: 222	Ian, you are seeing much faster render times than i, and it cant be accounted for just by the faster processor, can it?? Are you using a raid disk array?

June 4th, 2008, 05:11 PM	#15
Ian Stark Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 2,237	Hi Sherif, I'm going to have to say that I think it IS only the processor. I don't have RAID, only have 2Gb RAM, regular 7200 rpm data drives in desperate need of defragging (fast Raptor system drive though). I guess the other thing to take into account is the settings I'm using - so far I have only used the preset 'remove all noise' and haven't done any tweaking at all. What's your processor, out of interest? Ian . . . ps sorry but I have an early start in the morning so I'm going to bed now! __________________ www.vit-media.com www.classicmachinefilms.co.uk