Neat Video is considered one of the best, albeit slow, tools for combating various artefacts and problems with footage: from noise, grain, dust & scratches to compression artefacts and banding. However, a new purchase for Resolve users has recently become more difficult to justify, as Blackmagic Design itself offers a number of options for restoration. In addition to improved speed and new features, there is now also a more cost-effective DaVinci Resolve plug-in.
Speed
The noise reduction engine should be able to utilise your hardware better. The actual acceleration depends on the CPU, GPU and operating system used. According to the developers, CPU-based processing has become up to 1.5 times faster. GPU-based calculations, on the other hand, achieve results that are up to 3.5 times faster. If you would like to test the improvements yourself, you can download a benchmarking tool (Neat Bench) here.
Flicker, jitter and noise
Repeated changes in brightness (flickering) can now also be reduced via Neat Video 5 with the new flicker filter. Flicker artefacts can be filtered at individual points or in the entire frame. If you have distorted jitter artefacts of individual objects in a video, you can also use the new jitter filter.
This problem is often caused by video compression. These new features also enable the reduction of noise and grains to be improved and details to be retained.
New workflows
To make the entire tool more user-friendly and efficient, there are also new interface and workflow functions in Neat Video 5:
- Better noise profiles thanks to improved and automatic sampling for significantly more frames when analysing. Generic noise profiles can now also be adjusted manually for more fine-tuning.
- Visual feedback tools and masks for adjusting settings & filters.
- Playback feature with a live view of the changes via the plug-in window.
A list of all new features can be found in the change log here.
Availability and Resolve
Neat Video 5 is available for various editing software and also as an OpenFX plug-in for Windows, MacOS and Linux. If you only work in Resolve, you no longer need to buy the more expensive OFX host version. As already mentioned, a dedicated plug-in is now available for around 80 euros. You can find out more about the prices here.
