I broke down and purchased Neat Video's Pro noise suppression to use with Vegas Pro 8 after reading a thread earlier in the week on DVInfo. I love my XHA1, but it's low light performance is not stellar and it has a little more noise in some situations that the best cameras. Look at these candlelight tests with the XHA1 at +12 dB gain.

These are my first attempts with the software, and there are infinite combinations for adjusting filters and detail sharpening. I'm very impressed thus far and it only gets better from here!

Roger, I agree Neat Video is amazing. Are you using the sharpening as well? It works great because it does not sharpen the noise since it knows what the noise is in the clip.

I also use Neat video for After Effects and when using it in 16 bit mode you can get even better quality.

Marc,

I haven't mastered it by any means. Any tips for sharpening you want to share?

A couple of things.

1. It is critical that when you take your noise sample inside of Neat Video that your preview window in Vegas is set to Best/Full. If not you will not get as accurate a noise sample. This is buried in the Neat Video manual but very easy to miss.

2. Make sure you choose Progressive or Interlaced to match up with the footage your treating.

3. Inside of Neat Video under the noise filter settings check the "Y" box under sharpening. Many times I find I can get get not only cleaner footage but sharper footage. It's one of the best plugins I've used.

Regards, Marc

Marc,

I haven't mastered it by any means. Any tips for sharpening you want to share?

Marc,

Thanks. I've been using "Best/Full", but didn't realize its importance. I'll dig into sharpening a little deeper.

Thanks

How much does it coast?

No problem Roger. I usually edit in preview mode so I did not discover this till I sat down and read the manual.

As far as the cost I paid 99.00 and I think it is still the same. You have to buy a new version for each software program you want to use but they do give Vegas users the 64 bit version upgrade for free.

Thanks for taking the time to share, Roger. Impressive.

my only complaint is that its so slows down the rendering times.

A 20 minute video almost took 2 hours.

How much does it coast?

Pro version was $99 for Sony Vegas

Martin,

My renders slowed down, but not 6x. More like 1.5 - 2.0x on SD. I haven't rendered a significant HD yet, but it's coming up.

I am a fan of Neat as well. It can also be used as an interesting artistic effect. I used it in this way on the title sequence and specific segments of a documentary I made last year. I applied very extreme settings which really softened the image up nicely without blurring.

Outstanding tool.

I have been looking for something like this! Who do you order it from and is it compatible with Vegas Pro 9a?

Neat Video - best noise reduction for digital video (http://www.neatvideo.com/) tells all!

Martin,

I've had the opportunity now to use Neat on several HD projects, and it does slow things down more than HD as you suggest. I haven't done a comparison, but it's probably more than 2x.

Still, this is one of the greatest tools I've come across. I've had great success restoring old footage (Sony 8mm!) and making good footage look really good.


Bryan,

Yes it is supposed to be compatible with Vegas 9. Be sure and get the Pro version for $99 so you can do HD.