For those of you looking for a great noise reduction plugin for FCPX, Neat Video is really the only thing worth looking at:

http://www.neatvideo.com

Once you get past their not exactly to 2014 standards website and figure out how to pay for, download, and install the plugin, you’ll likely be blown away by how amazing this plugin really is. A few things to keep in mind as you use it:

• Render times are LONG… and get longer the larger the resolution of your footage is. Don’t put it on until you’re as close to done with your edit as possible.
• If you’re applying from FCPX, apply the Filter onto your clip(s), then go into the inspector and hit “select to open” and that will open the plugin interface.
• Once you’re there, look at this page: http://www.neatvideo.com/howtos.html and watch some tutorials for best practices.
  Also, for better performance, once you’re inside the plugin, make sure you go under Tools_Performance and then make sure you enable GPU rendering, and bump up the number of cores your machine uses to render. By default, these numbers are set low.
• Avoid using on 4K stuff unless you’ve got A Lot of render time to spare. Quick tip is to bring your 4K stuff down into a 1080 sequence first. Also, if you’re dealing with RED RAW, it may make sense to export the segments requiring noise reduction first, then cut them back in over the RAW footage… then apply the plugin. Neat video works WAY better with ProRes.
• The New Mac Pro is way better friends with Neat Video than the iMac and Macbook Pro are.
  If you already have Neat Video, make sure you have the latest version (3.6)… among other things like (like Resolve support), there were some significant render and GFX support changes to the latest version.
• You may want to turn off background rendering while you’re applying Neat Video and playing with the settings… and then render everything out when you’re done all at once. FCPX can hang a lot with this plugin if you’re not careful, especially on slower machines.
• Once you’ve done the noise profile from within the plugin interface, there will typically be a huge improvement that will likely be pretty much what you wanted… however, if you go and play with the temporal radius setting in the inspector in FCPX, the higher you go, the higher quality (and render times) you will likely see.
• Neat video is really great at saving shots you didn’t think you’d be able to use. Before you throw out a shot because of how noisy it is… try putting neat video on it. It’s saved me a bunch of times.

Review disclaimer – Yes, we do sometimes get free products and licenses (but not always). No, this does not affect our reviews. We only advocate and sell the products that we use in our own workflows. If we bother to review something, it’s because we use it in our day to day and like it. We also very much admit that we haven’t seen everything… if you think there’s a product out there that we should be talking about, please let us know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Mestman, FCPWORKS.

Sam Mestman

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Workflow Architect, Sam Mestman. Sam’s also a regular writer for fcp.co and MovieMaker Magazine, teaches post workflow at RED’s REDucation classes, and is the founder and CEO of We Make Movies, a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto which is dedicated to making the movie industry not suck. If you’ve got any FCP X questions or need some help putting together a system, drop him an email at workflow@fcpworks.com and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

Comments