Resolve Noise Reduction VS. Neat Video...which is better?

DaVinci Resolve Noise Reduction vs Neat Video. Which is better....and why??

nether, DVO clairity defines the word "better"

i think of a scale between 1 and 10, DVO Clairity being 10, median filter being 1

we are discussing 5.1 -vs- 5.2 on that scale... they are not really all that diffrent, and Resolve native is faster by a long shot

that said i use Neat in software that does not have any other options
use the native in Resolve, Neat is just too slow for cleint supervised use

@Jason Bowdach just did a fantastic half-hour 2-part video comparing and contrasting Resolve 16 TNR/SNR with the latest Neat Video v5 over on MixingLight.com. (Note that this is a pay site, but I think the information they provide is worth the investment.)

Short version: I think Neat does a better job overall but a) it costs more money, b) it takes more time, and c) it's very tweaky and has a lot of settings you have to carefully adjust for best results. Their latest version is the best they've ever done and is made especially for Resolve.

In truth, the SNR Enhanced mode in Resolve -- which they give you free with Resolve Studio -- is almost as good and is already included. The trick for me is to adjust it on a scene by scene basis, consider doing NR on one color channel only (like Blue, which tends to be noisy), and also adjust Luma and Chroma separately. The more Luma NR you use, the greater the risk of softening the picture. I tend to have a couple of settings for day scenes / day interiors, and a couple of settings for night scenes, and I usually wind up using more NR for night, taking care to avoid artifacts.

Neat can rescue extremely grainy shots.
Resolve NR doesn't work beyond a certain noise level.

If you are working on paid jobs and have some clients bringing in very problematic shots, I think it‘s worth having both. With the new, lower pricing it’s even easier to go for it.
It can fix a few things that don’t work so well in Resolve alone, like the pulsing noise from drones or flicker induced by critical light sources.

@Jason Bowdach just did a fantastic half-hour 2-part video comparing and contrasting Resolve 16 TNR/SNR with the latest Neat Video v5 over on MixingLight.com. (Note that this is a pay site, but I think the information they provide is worth the investment.)

Short version: I think Neat does a better job overall but a) it costs more money, b) it takes more time, and c) it's very tweaky and has a lot of settings you have to carefully adjust for best results. Their latest version is the best they've ever done and is made especially for Resolve.

In truth, the SNR Enhanced mode in Resolve -- which they give you free with Resolve Studio -- is almost as good and is already included. The trick for me is to adjust it on a scene by scene basis, consider doing NR on one color channel only (like Blue, which tends to be noisy), and also adjust Luma and Chroma separately. The more Luma NR you use, the greater the risk of softening the picture. I tend to have a couple of settings for day scenes / day interiors, and a couple of settings for night scenes, and I usually wind up using more NR for night, taking care to avoid artifacts.

This has been my experience as well.

Neat Video is a very powerful tool and I used it to recover some dark images I had shot, where we had little choice with the lighting given. Being able to capture a noise print from your specific camera and use it as a starting point in Neat, is fantastic--but it did take me a long time to tweak, trial & error, etc. to get it to where I wanted. And noise is one of those things you really have to see in motion to get an idea of its impact, which sometimes means needing to render out at least a portion of the timeline to see where you're "at".

The Spatial NR Enhanced mode is fantastic for a lot of noise reduction scenarios, provided you're not careless with it.

Hey,

I'll give my opinion too here (I did it last year in a very interesting thread but don't have the guts to search now) : making it very short, comparing different situations/projects involving different types of noise to solve and taking price, time and efficiency into account, I came to the conclusion that Neat wasn't worth buying it for those who are not owners yet in 2020.

Ok, maybe a bit radical, I could understand complaints but I made it short, that's all.... If you really make the greatest effort to tweak - separate luma/chroma, analyse the noise of your clips, making the best node tree needed - inside Resolve, you can really reach a very satisfying point now...

For the purpose of this post, I found again this super basic post on the web : https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/post-p ... tion-tips/ . Just doing it combined with smart efforts with Resolve Studio tools can honestly lead you to amazing results.
Of course, no answer is always accurate, it depends on clips, but we have a great % of chance to make it fine in Resolve only now...

Using both I have to say that Resolve Studio NR gives more natural results, Neat Video is way to aggressive even with low settings. Plastic looks becomes evident quickly. Now if you have very noisy footage like drone at night shots at 1600 ISO Neat Video can save the day. I prefer now DR. results are more pleasing to the eye.

Even though I own Neat Video 4 I never use it.

I find Resolves NR to be easy to use, configurable and always within arms length. Even a single Vega FE plows through at an OK pace. Cache early and forget.

Neat Video might make sense for people to do lots of NR on footage for which they have custom profiles that have been prepared in advance, but for day to day NR I'm very happy with what Resolve already offers.

Make note of the tips from Marc above, like doing NR on an isolated channel to remove most of it, while retaining some of the original texture from one of the better channels.

I've used Neat quite a bit over the years in FCP 7 and Premiere but am just getting started with Resolve as my editing platform. So far only the free version, so I've wondered whether it was a better use of my money to buy Neat for Resolve at $159 for a version that will run UHD or just spring a little more for Studio Resolve at $299.
So a couple of questions come to mind:

1- One of the coolest and least talked about uses for Neat is that its a fantastic sharpening tool for slightly soft footage. I've used it to fix footage where I just missed the focus point and it can be pretty much invisible. I don't know if there is any other tool in Resolve that can do that, but i certainly never found anything in FCP7 or Premiere that didn't artifact terribly. I also have never found it hard to find settings that worked well for me. Very fast to set up.

2 - Is Resolve noise reduction that much faster say on my machine (specs below) 2017 iMac 27" Retina 4 core i7 with 8GB VRam and 64G Ram?

3 - Is it much more complicated to find settings that work for each project in Resolve NR?

3 - Any other cool reasons to upgrade to Studio for a light user of Post? (I doubt I'll need anything larger than UHD.)

Thanks - This is a great forum.

Lenny

I got pretty much the same machine. If I set Resolve's "Motion Estimation Type“ to „Better“ (which you should to get close to Neatvideo) it will be only about 20% faster than Neatvideo 5. If you add spatial denoise at „Enhanced“ it can be three times slower without showing that much of an improvement.

But both denoisers don't have a "one size fits all" setting. Neatvideo can be tuned very fast if you print and record their chart for noise profiles, use only one camera and have such charts recorded for your typical ISO setting. Resolve's NR needs fine-tuning for the scene.

OTOH, Studio has much more to offer than just the NR.

2 - Is Resolve noise reduction that much faster say on my machine (specs below) 2017 iMac 27" Retina 4 core i7 with 8GB VRam and 64G Ram?

Uli answered it all. Resolve NR is handy, but you cannot have one regular global speed for any specific test you'll run... However you will certainly quickly understand what you want to choose for each clip profile

3 - Is it much more complicated to find settings that work for each project in Resolve NR?

As written above, not one fits 'em all but using it a bit will show you whay to do in what situation. For example, I personally didn't have satisfying results (sometimes no result at all) with TNR on interlaced footage, this on every interlaced footage I had... I finally found out that a few clicks on spatial NR solved 95% of what was needed there. I think this is what's going to happen for many users : just remember specific actions depending on clips profiles.
And then this (understanding it > choosing the parameters for it) is very fast in Resolve, therefore for me the whole workflow is faster in Resolve than with Neat.

3 - Any other cool reasons to upgrade to Studio for a light user of Post? (I doubt I'll need anything larger than UHD.)

Sure. When I switched from FCP7 to Resolve 9, I already owned Neat, and thus had no specific need for NR. My main personal reason (which won't be yours) was the double GPU to compute and don't regret it.
But in the end, you'll I found great stuff too (camera tracker, motion effects, face refinement, deflicker, ...). And I think this is what happens to a lot of users, I mean switching for a couple of solid reasons and finally finding a lot more...

I've just discovered that after upgrading to 16.2 from 16.1.2, that after applying Neat 5, my system is crashing very frequently and using more GPU resources than it did on the same test clip on 16.1.2. So, just rolled back to that version. On the 8K timelapse sequences I work with, Neat will work well, but unfortunately the native NR in Resolve will crash the program almost immediately. Sort of surprising, as I would have expected Neat to he more resource hungry.

System:
AMD Threadripper 3960x
Nvidia 2080ti
128GB ram
NVMe drives
Windows 10 Pro

Well, even a 2080ti might be challenged by 8K with NR. What's your frame radius?

Yes, clearly there are some functions which I realize I'm underpowered for when doing 8K. Ideally for all functions to work in all cases, I probably should have about 20GB of Vram as opposed to the 11GB on the 2080ti, and perhaps more than the 128GB of ram I presently have. However, for my current 8K workflow, the current system appears to be quite adaquet. I should point out that I don't do anything in Fusion mode, and all compositing and related tasks are done in Color Mode. Fusion is MUCH MORE GPU intensive, and I'm not a big fan of it anyway, for my projects.

Good morning
I am not an expert in noise reduction settings, and I have seen this video:

I don't know if the author who posted in this forum:
https://mavicpilots.com/threads/noise-r ... in.101842/

I have made an optimal settin with DaVinci Resolve, but when I see the Neat Video movie it seems better to me.

NeatVideo does a great job on a specific problem with drone footage. See here:
https://www.neatvideo.com/news/neat-blog

That said, general NR comes quite close in Resolve. BTW, I can denoise 12K BRAW in a 4K timeline just fine on my hardware.

I followed the steps of the premiumbeat blog in the post of Sam Steti (first post). The result was a very washed out image. To me this is no wonder when you turn the saturation to zero in one layernode and turn the Y-sliders down in the other layernode. No color in the top-layernode with full color in the other layernode is half the color in the end, thus a washed out look. I must be doing something wrong, but what? What did I miss?

On a rare occasion when I can't degrain using Resolve's NR I reach for Neat. It does a superior job but it's not real time.

Can an rtx 3080 or 3090 play full speed (25 fps) 4k braw in real-time with heavy denoise ?
I have an rtx 3060 and it plays a few fps only….

Can an rtx 3080 or 3090 play full speed (25 fps) 4k braw in real-time with heavy denoise ?
I have an rtx 3060 and it plays a few fps only….

With my 3090 I can play back 4K BRAW with 5 frames/better motion TNR in real time on a 4K timeline.

And with spatial denoise, faster option?

Also real time.

On a rare occasion when I can't degrain using Resolve's NR I reach for Neat. It does a superior job but it's not real time.

Another plus for Neat is that you can use it on finished shows. With Resolve, there's always the danger that it might let some image "smear" stray across a cut transition because of processing lag. I've never had that happen with Neat, but we tend to manually create cuts and change settings depending on the nature of the material.

I think I have seen Walter detail some bad behavior by the NR tool when using a scene cut workflow, using frame(s) from the previous sequence.