Neat Video & Neat Image community

Congrats on a superb NR tool.

I am using NV to clean up 16 mm film grain on hd material.
The film grain reduction is amazing. The grain is uniform over time, and NV is doing a great job of reducing noise, esp in the blue sky and leaving other details in the scenes intact.

My workflow:
Capture 8 bit or 10 bit uncompressed 1920 x 1080 avi.
Perform scene by scene profiling. (For this I use the razor tool to separate scenes, unless there is a faster way...)
Perform render pass in Premier Pro.
Export a new uncompressed 8 bit avi.
Import the new avi file to a stand alone VC-1 encoder for BluRay compression.

For best quality NR, assuming a decent profile, does it help NV if I capture 10 bit vs 8 bit. I'm thinking that if NV has more image info it will do a better job of NR, ie more precise in targeting just film grain.

Is there a significant hit in processor cycles by rendering NV on 10 bit vs 8 bit source?

Theoretically yes, more bits help. However you will have to make sure all your workflow in Premiere is able to support those higher-than-8-bits of data. Neat Video Pro does support higher bitdepth in Premiere, but some codecs may only work with 8-bit data.

Regarding the processing speed, it is about the same but higher bitdepth frames occupy more memory space and that may become a limitation since memory resources are not endless in 32-bit Premiere..

So, I would try to work in higher bitdepth in Premiere, but you may encounted lack of memory issues just because higher bitdepth footage requires more memory, which is especially important for HD footage.

Vlad

After six months of using Neat, I will be upgrading from XP 32 bit to 64 bit on a new dual quad core w/1333 Mhz memory (based on your recommendations). I did this so I could start using 10 bit source video and also I will be using Magic Bullet Frames which is very resource intensive (renders internally at 12 bit I think)

A couple questions:
First, will NV run on 64 bit OS?
If so do you recommend XP 64 or Vista 64?

Also I was intrigued by your answer on a different post about using AE to host the NV plugin on a render farm.

How do you recommend this be implented? We are not using anything fancy like a Fiber network, just a Gigabit router that feeds several Windows and Intel Mac workstations.
Is it as simple as installing AE w/NV plugin on multiple networked computers and enabling Node rendering in AE, then specifying computers on the network to use? Also for the render farm can I mix Intel Macs and PCs running AE w/plugin? We have a ton of Macs since it's primarily a design shop...

I have no experience with AE so please excuse my ignorance on the subject. I assume the standalone performance would be the same for NR rendering on AE as it is on Premiere Pro.

DVDMogul wrote:First, will NV run on 64 bit OS?
If so do you recommend XP 64 or Vista 64?

NV itself doesn't care, it will work in both versions. However, many host applications (especially newer ones) will certainly prefer newer Windows versions.

DVDMogul wrote:Also I was intrigued by your answer on a different post about using AE to host the NV plugin on a render farm.

How do you recommend this be implented? We are not using anything fancy like a Fiber network, just a Gigabit router that feeds several Windows and Intel Mac workstations.
Is it as simple as installing AE w/NV plugin on multiple networked computers and enabling Node rendering in AE, then specifying computers on the network to use? Also for the render farm can I mix Intel Macs and PCs running AE w/plugin? We have a ton of Macs since it's primarily a design shop...

In principle it should all work but I haven't personally tested such a configuration of different computers. In any case, it is mostly a question of organizing a general distributed rendering using AE. NV will come into play after all is already set and working. You will just have to install it on each computer (of course you will need an N-user license for NV to install it on N computers that are supposed to run it simultaneously) and let AE manage distributed rendering.

DVDMogul wrote:I assume the standalone performance would be the same for NR rendering on AE as it is on Premiere Pro.

Yes, it is usually the same in AE and PR.

Vlad