[David Lightman]

Thanks Steve – I’ll give that a go when I attempt my final mixdown.

[David Lightman]

If Neat Video is something you use on a lot of projects a faster GPU with CUDA support is definitely something that will speed up rendering times.

Here’s how they define the rendering speed upgrades in version 3:

https://www.neatvideo.com/news.html#Neat-Video-v3-2011-8-25

[David Lightman]

The key omission from your setup list at the top is version of Neat Video you’re using.

As Bryan mentioned Version 3 (or now 3.1) is a much faster than version 2. Version 3 is at least 2x as fast as V2 (2.6 etc) when only using your CPU. Version 3 (released last winter) also now supports CUDA GPUs for another 2x to 4x speed boost (Version 2 didn’t use GPUs at all)

It does add a lot of time to renders but the difference between version 2 and 3 is huge. Using only Neat Video HD projects in the 1.5hr range could take 30+hrs to render on my i7 2600 + 560TI. With version 3 the same projects take 6 to 8hrs to render (usually just run them overnight).

If you’re using V3 there’s a benchmark tool located in Tools/Preferences/Performance . That’ll show you the FPS for each frame radius setting using different number of CPU cores and w/ or w/o GPU. Pick the setting that yields the highest FPS.

Based on those benchmarks you can also lower (or disable) the Temporal Filter radius. The default is one frame but if you change that to 0 rendering will definitely speed up. Depending on the project the temporal filter might not make all that much difference anyway.

Hope this helps a bit.