Neat Video

[Scorer]

Hopefully there are some Neat Video users on here.

I had a question: Do you prefer to apply Neat Video to your video before color correction and all of that stuff, or after?

Initially I was going to reduce noise for all of my video first, and then go back and color grade it, etc. like normal.

Thoughts?

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

I've heard arguments for both sides - personally I generally use it after color correction, because in the process of grading you often change the nature of the visible noise. Sometimes just adding a little contrast to a shot can drop the visible noise, other times bringing up shadow detail makes it much more noticeable. Once you've made those changes you can more effectively judge how aggressive you need to be with neat - you really don't want to use any more noise reduction than you absolutely have to or you'll end up with the dreaded plastic look. If you do have to push it far you'll likely find that adding a little bit of noise back in afterwards (with a noise or film grain filter) can help take some of the edge off the overly-smooth results.

 

[Scorer]

Thanks for your reply, and I agree, it would make sense doing it after color correction for those reasons. As far as trying to get it looking more natural after making it overly smooth, would adding sharpness work?

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

No, adding sharpness doesn't help. Neat has sharpening capabilities, and you'll probably want to use them lightly to reduce some of the softening that comes from heavy noise reduction, but they won't do anything for things like skin that becomes too smooth and 'plasticy' once you've reduced the noise a lot. That's where a light pass with a noise or grain filter can at least break up the smooth areas a little, give some texture back and make them look slightly less artificial. It's not perfect, and of course ideally you want to shoot such that it's not necessary to do any of this, but it can help if you're trying to salvage footage that's just too noisy to be used otherwise.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

Here's an example from a music video I shot a little while ago. This is a 100% crop of just part of the frame. The original footage is very noisy, shot at ISO 6400 on a 5DmkII with very little light. You can see that after neat video the noise is gone but his skin tones look smoothed over and unnatural. Adding just a little bit of noise - note the settings are very low - breaks that smoothness up and makes it look more natural, it even makes it look sharper because there appears to be more detail.

 

[Cracker Funk]

I love Neat Video!!!

I just finished coloring a video that leaned very heavily on Neat Video to save some shots that would otherwise be useless. My first time using it, I also pondered the order of operations.

I decided that I should render all of it at once (maybe that goes without being said, I dunno). Anyway, I toyed around with moving Colorista and Neat Video back-and-forth on top of each other, and I found that it looked best with Colorista on top. I have no clue if that means it processed first, all I know is that in the clip effects window, I put it on top, and me likey!

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

Editing in FCP? If so yes, colorista rendered first, order of operations is always top-down. I suspect you might not see accurate results just by swapping the order of the filters though - since neat video builds a profile of the noise first you would need to do that each time you swapped them so the profile accounted for changes made by any filters ahead of it in the chain. In any case, personally I think neat video works best after your color filters.