Video Noise Reduction in DaVinci Resolve: The Neat Video OFX Plug-In

Now the hard question is this: having Neat for FCP & Full Resolve, should I upgrade my neat license to OFX or not… From your insight, I understand that I don’t have to.

If all you use are Neat’s ‘Auto’ toolset (which is what Robbie explored in this video) – you’ll probably not miss the plug-in in Resolve. I’ve found Resolve’s built-in Temporal NR to be *extremely* robust and useful.

But if you regularly need to dig into the advanced tools in Neat on FCP… you’ll probably miss those in Resolve. If you email the Neat guys directly, they have upgrade pricing if you so choose.

I don’t know if Robbie would agree with me or not…

Well let me first say – that I have Neat for most tools that I use – Resolve, FCP, Premiere Pro etc. I realize that not everyone will do that but I like having the flexibility to use it where ever I go.

Next, I would agree with Pat – On the shot featured in the Insight, yes it was very very close, but I’ve found Neat to have this small edge or much larger one depending on the shot. I think the ability to have more frames as part of the temporal process, and adaptive noise reduction are HUGE. And as Pat points out, diving into the full manual controls of Neat that I only just showed quickly – you can easily out perform the built in tools – but that takes some considerable amount of tweaking.

Also, I’m sorry I didn’t show this in the video as I’m still trying to get clarification on from the various dev teams. One thing I really like in FCP/Premiere Pro versions of Neat is the ability to Optimize it for your system with number of cores, and the GPUs in your system. For example I’ve been able to get the renders on my main workstation to be faster than realtime in FCP and Premiere.

This functionality for optimizing exists in the OFX version, but I’ve also heard that OFX plugins can only leverage one GPU per the Resolve frame work. Still waiting to hear if the 1 GPU limitation is 100% universal or different OFX developers can use more than one GPU.

My point is on my main workstation (4x GTX Titans + GTX 760 GUI) after optimizing (which may or may not be doing anything!) Neat generally has better playback performance – but thats unscientific more gut feeling.

Finally, some of this is familiarity and trust. So far I’ve had a lot of situations with the built in tools where I’ve had some weird aliasing etc. But applying Neat – I have had no problems. Over the years I’ve just relied on Neat and I’m probably just not as good with the built in tools yet.

At the end of the day for me – Neat is more familiar, slightly faster and produces slightly better results. Is that worth the price? For me – yes I think so as it gives me added flexibility to the built in tools.

I had been waiting for this tutorial on the Neat noise reduction software for Resolve for weeks. It’s exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you Robbie. You’ve clarified a number of questions I had on my mind regarding Neat and the built-in Resolve noise reduction. You guys Rock!

Hey Robbie thanks for taking the time to do this. You mentioned that there are more advanced settings to noise reduce per color channel. I was wondering if I can take your take insight and combine it with Dan’s insight on splitting the channels and putting the plug in on the channel node that needs the most work?

Absolutely! In fact, that’s a very effective way of dealing with Noise Reduction while minimizing new artifacts. Go for it.

Chris – Sorry its taking me a while to get back to you – my wife and I just had our second kid – so I’m just getting back in the swing of things. Two things – of course you can what you suggested and Pat endorsed below. However, within Neat there are advanced controls – see screen shot. They work for more detailed control but they also are limited to YCbCr. Like most things its usually a combination of approaches that works best.

“You’ll have to weigh purchasing the full version of Resolve ($999) vs the OFX plugin from Neat ($199) (which works in both versions of the application) for you’re noise reduction needs.”

Maybe some update needed:
At the moment Resolve Studio’s price is $299
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

Indeed.