Octane and Neatvideo

[darkline]

Not sure how helpful this will be to anyone, or if this is standard practice and I'm not telling you anything you don't know.... but if like me you need speed over anything, then I've found the neatvideo plugin a really efficient way to reduce the noise on animations in octane.

For example, I left a scene rendering for 1 min - took a snapshot at 1080p, and another at 4 minutes. The noise is obviously less on the 4 min image, but it's still very present. However I found that neatvideo can reduce the noise even on the 1 minute image to an extent that it looks smoother than the 4 min render. I find that shallow DOF in octane produces noisy out of focus grain which takes a long time to clean up. Neatvideo can smooth out images really nicely in these situations.

Of course, this is scene dependent, and NR used too aggressively will eventually introduce artifacts and you'll lose detail in the image. I'm not saying this is a perfect solution...But used subtly I have found this to be a real time saver and can seriously hack render times down for those doing long animations. So if you have an image that's 90% there and you don't want to wait another 4 hours for it to be noiseless, try out the demo - it might be useful to you.

http://www.neatvideo.com/download.html

It's simple to use but I found that rendering a uniform material with flat lighting first in octane for 1 minute (or however long your renders will roughly be - to give you a sample of the noise type) is the best thing to do. Highlight the noisy area in neatvideo and save this noise profile as a preset. Then use it on the full renders you kick out. I have created different noise profiles for different resolutions. (If you're working in 1080p then make sure you use a noise profile created from a 1080p image and not 720p for example)

If you find that Neatvideo is taking out image detail, you could try rendering even higher resolution so there's more chance it will grab the noise and preserve the details (as long as you create a high resolution noise profile first).

You get even better results using a test animation over a still image. There is a temporal NR setting which works by comparing noise patterns frame to frame, and this can clean images up even further.

I'll upload some images when I'm done with the job, but I'm finding it useful for production renders where I wouldn't normally use octane because of time.

[LudovicRouy]

Akvis noisebuster is really efficient too, I generally make a very high resolution picture (8k x 8k) and use it after a 2 or 3 min rendering, i didn't use the hotpixel filter in octane because it's less efficient and reduce render quality.

[retmia]

Neatvideo works rather well ... But it still remains some very hot pixels / fireflyes : very lighted dots which are very hard to get rid off in animation. And if you push to high Neat video settings then you will start to really lose information from the picture ... anoying

I'm working on low light animation these days and I have found no way to finally get rid of these yet ...
I've been seeking all over the web and found nothing convincing ... Any idea anyone ?

[darkline]

Can you upload some grabs? What resolution are you rendering out to?

I found neat video to be one of the best, but there are limitations.

[retmia]

I managed to get rid of the too bright pixel within octane settings [...] I didn't notice that the remove firefly value was reversed! So everything works perfect by now !

[nehale]

Neatvideo works rather well ... But it still remains some very hot pixels / fireflyes : very lighted dots which are very hard to get rid off in animation. And if you push to high Neat video settings then you will start to really lose information from the picture ... anoying

I'm working on low light animation these days and I have found no way to finally get rid of these yet ...
I've been seeking all over the web and found nothing convincing ... Any idea anyone ?

here is a simple render test i ran https://vimeo.com/66752181

[mbetke]

Thanks for the video. I also use Neatvideo from time to time and it does a good job.

You video is a bit misleading because you have large areas of the same color and there is not much detail to loose there.
It woud look much more blurry and loose details if you use it on an image with more color variation and small details.

[nehale]

Thanks for the video. I also use Neatvideo from time to time and it does a good job.

You video is a bit misleading because you have large areas of the same color and there is not much detail to loose there.
It woud look much more blurry and loose details if you use it on an image with more color variation and small details.

Yes that is very true, I wanted to see how it handles excessive noise since it was my first time using it, from what i can see its very similar to the noise reduction in lightroom or camera raw, wont work well if there is a lot of fine detail and if the render is at a low resolution

[rappet]

Thanx for sharing...
Very interesting.
I downloaded the demo immediately to experiment with adobe premiere and virtualdub!
This might help in reducing needed rendertimes for animation when working on a short deadline
Greetz,