8K Video: Background Appears "Smudged"

Have noticed a weird issue with DaVinci Resolve Studio 20. I have 8K footage on an 8K timeline, displayed out a 4K DCI monitor. At 1.0x scale, the background, particularly green tones look like a pastel smudge filter was applied to the footage.
However, as soon as I use the Transform menu and slowly scale it up, at 1.4x the blur goes away and the details appear.
What is causing this?

I found out the cause of this smudging problem.

Apparently I had worked earlier on a noisy high ISO video and had copied the attributes from that clip and one of the attributes, besides the LUT, was heavy noise reduction. Frankly, I am amazed that my workstation can play 8K footage with noise AI reduction applied without strain.

It really caught my attention when I used the transform to zoom out of a clip and the whole clip would turn into pastel smudge painting like a French Impressionist style. Then I said, wait a minute.. something's going on here..

So anyway, I went through all the clips on the timeline and reset the NR for each of them. No more smudge effects.

Good find. Never would have thought of that.

Good find. Never would have thought of that.

I frankly didn't expect NR to have that kind of effect on transformed footage. I could transform the footage to a small area, like 33% and it would look completely like a Rembrandt painting. I don't think that would work well for PiP DVE stuff...

NR can be very destructive if set too strong.
Did you ever try Neatvideo?

NR can be very destructive if set too strong.

Yeah, I've warned students many times, "there's always a price to pay for noise reduction." None of it is absolutely clean and artifact-free.

One secret with Neat Video that I've used for years is to back off the settings by about 50%, which lets more of the original signal back in. I would rather see half the noise than all of the noise -- it looks a lot more natural to me.

I would rather see half the noise than all of the noise

Conversely, I would rather see half the noise that none of the noise.

People look too plastic without noise.

Have never tried Neat Video. Too expensive for my tastes.

More impressive is Topaz Labs stuff. It's like magic what that program can do for old video, especially old VHSucks video captures. I'm going to try testing the demo and see how it does on some sample footage.

Have never tried Neat Video. Too expensive for my tastes.

More impressive is Topaz Labs stuff. It's like magic what that program can do for old video, especially old VHSucks video captures. I'm going to try testing the demo and see how it does on some sample footage.

Topaz is the worst at giving the plastic look that Jim mentions, along with monster faces. Their latest model Starlight Mini apparently fixes that and does remarkable results for SD footage such as VHS at 2x upscale, but at 1fps for an rtx 5090, 0.3fps for a 4090. It's still pretty new so hope they can speed it up.