Neat is great, but honestly the davinci resolve solution has less artifacting, in less aggressive low light and is far more homogeneous, especially in difficult shots like the opening shot. I personally would still use Neat most of the time for true low light if given the choice but it's not worth it if you don't shoot a lot of that type of content.
I bought the DaVinci Resolve studio few months ago, and I was blown away with the the integrated denouncing among many other things, It the most amazing software I have ever bought, it´s light-years ahead the rest... I also bought topaz labs video enhance ai and it´s the most useless software I have ever bought, it overpriced, slow and has never delivered usable results (at least for me) and by the way I loved your video :)
Neat Video has always been and will always be the best in my opinion... It's incredible! The only downside you didn't mention is that the plugin isn't super stable (at least in Premiere). Otherwise it's fantastic
Lol, Premiere by it self its not stable. On top of that, you have so many people who blame everything else but Premiere, oh by the way, its a NLE that you rent and with the money that people pay, they should at least, try to keep up with competition, oh wait let me give you a little history, they did once, that was at the time FCP was kicking their behind, they they scrash and started premiere 1.0 and they struggle for a while, then apple came up with FCP X, stupid move at that time, a break for adobe to shine with premiere, but today, you will be left behind if you don't keep up with the future. So is not Neat video the problem. Did I said resolve its free with the best color grading tool, Hollywood standard for color grading, anyone who argues about this, well normally if you go to the military, only a small % makes it to the end.
No surprises on the NR comparison. Neat Video has been an integral part of my video pipeline for a few years now. (definitely get the update! It's not only faster, but even better quality as well). The only thing that surprised me, was that you thought the difference between Neat Video and the built-in noise reduction in DaVinci Resolve was negligible. I completely disagree. Even in your video, the difference is night and day! Lastly, the banding introduced by Neat Video is not due to loss of bit depth, but rather because it exposes the limits of the codec. After denoising with Neat Video, you need to re-texture, adding film grain, at least enough to reduce banding by blending the different gradients through noise and texture. This is especially important for H.264 exports, as that codec relies on no use to avoid banding.
Hello, there. Fanstastic thorough comparison, thanks for the work. Have you ever thought on doing something similar about upscaling software? I mean, comparing Resolve's Super Scaling, with Topaz's Gigapixel AI, etc. The more I learn about video editing in general, the more Resolve Studio seems like such a good deal for the asked price, given all the package offers. I might buy one licence real soon... That is, if I figure out how to do so in my country. Their adopted distribuition method is absolutely horrendous.
Thank you for doing this, and for presenting it in such a clear, compelling way. Now all I need to do is figure out which video software to buy! (I'll check your videos to see if you have any reviews similar to this one).
If you are talking about what editing software to use and you are learning from scratch? Then resolve. :) free and it's a real pro software. And if you need all the pro features, you can just buy the studio version or buy one of BMD's cameras and you'll get the studio version as well.
Thx for this video, very informative...I use denoiser III and Resolve for noise reduction but I'll definitely try Neat video, not happy with denoiser III at all, time for a change.
Very good comparison! Yet I am not the one to critique but to my eye there is a visible difference in lighting between the open sky and the sky behind the trees. Perhaps the mask was done quickly just for the purpose of this video. Apologies if I am wrong.
Topaz is pretty fast now, well it was last year too so I don't know why it took so long for you. A 10 second clip probably takes about 20 seconds on my m1 max
Just test Topaz on 4k with denoise on full. Does about a frame second. Tested Neatvideo and it does a much better job though it's now €129! Topaz is better value IMHO as it does ok noise reduction but a whole lot more (upscaling being it's strat feature)
Thanks for the comparisons; Today how does FCP's native Noise Reduction compare with NEAT? The FCP one seems to be quite slow but any thoughts on the quality of the NR? thanks in advance.
I was wondering the same thing, because I'm not sure he knew what he was doing with that. It can be confusing if you don't know what each setting is for.
Well in Germany the FullHD Version can be bought for about 66 Euros. The 4K Version for Premiere is 115 Euro. For some reason resolve is more expensive :/
Interesting information. I hadn't thought of noise reduction in video with third party software. I'm currently looking into noise reduction for photography and tripped over this comparison "by mistake." What comparison can be made in the effort by a novice user to apply Neat vs Resolve Studio to get acceptable results? For example how much fiddling around with sliders will each take vs letting an intelligent program do a better job than an inexperienced user who is guessing?
I play around with Neat Video sliders in Davinci Resolve without any real plan or knowledge and found solid results without much effort, even 5-10 minutes after trying it for the first time. It’s impressive and although it’s always better to understand what you’re doing, it’s not entirely necessary.
TOPAZ is one of the worst denoisers on market I ever tested: Let it be old one or new AI or video enhance. Everything it VideoEnhance is somehow usable, but denoise sliders have to be on zero all the time. Very bad. It smudges details like mad. And introduce new artefacts.
It's $200 for the entire suite of software, not just the VE. And VE isn't really made for noise reduction, it's made for upscaling which it does a fantastic job of.
Topaz AI is anything but a scam,ask any photographer. You buy a lot more than the video denoiser for the 200 bucks too. Their video enhancement Features aside for their upscaling ARE comparatively outdated though but not made for low light footage to begin with.