Neat Video Won’t Apply to Footage or Render

[Ben Withington]

It might be worth mentioning that the effect does work properly in FCPX. I have a Nvidia 9600 GT and in the preferences for Neat Video it says, “No computation -capable GPU devices found”. This is evidently because of the plugin not being able to load the CUDA driver for my GPU. However, from my research it seems that feature is not required for the plugin to function as it should; it’s more of a performance thing.

I also tried re-installing the plugin which didn’t change anything.

As far as I can remember, all the settings in AE are default for a CS6 installation. I’ve only been changing the project to 16 bpc, but tried it in 8 bpc too just to try it.

[Ben Withington]

Found this post from Dave LaRonde at the Adobe forums:

“If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

I’m a Mac guy, so I like to convert to Quicktime movies in the Animation or PNG codecs; both are lossless. I’ll use Apple’s Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder or Quicktime Pro to do it.”

I am using H.264, and that turned out to be the problem. I converted to 4444 and it immediately worked.

However, I’m a bit bummed because this adds another generation of compression to my workflow for this particular project (I edited it in native H.264 in FCPX, so that has created some difficulties for myself). I also want to use a 3D Lut, which will not work in FCPX.

If I can convince myself that H22 (HQ) is ok for festival screenings, I could do everything but the grading in FCPX and that’d streamline things.

[Ben Withington]

Wow, thanks Dave! I had no idea 422 was that durable, that will significantly ease up my workflow. My noobie speculation faculties were generating paranoia about my image falling to pieces if ever projected on a big screen. Obviously it will never be RAW or higher than 1080p, but at least I know now that I was worrying about nothing.